k 



THE EVOLUTION OF 

SINN FEIN 



THE EVOLUTION OF 
SINN FEIN 



BY 
R. M. HENRY, M.A. 

Queen's University, Belfast 




NEW YORK, MCMXX 



B. W. HUEBSCH, Inc. 



COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
B. W. HUEBSCH, Inc. 






PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMEEIOA 



MAR 19!321 
0)C1.A611441 



CONTENTS 

Introductory, i 

Irish Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century, 17 

Sinn Fein, 43 

The Early Years of Sinn Fein, 79 

Sinn Fein and the Republicans, 98 

The Volunteer Movement, 118 

Ulster and Nationalist Ireland, 142 

Sinn Fein, 1914 — 1916, 176 

After the Rising, 237 

Conclusion, 312 



THE EVOLUTION OF 
SINN FEIN 



INTRODUCTORY 

It is almost a commonplace of the political mor- 
alists that every failure on the part of England to 
satisfy the moderate and constitutional demands 
of the Irish people for reform has been followed 
invariably by a deplorable outbreak of " extrem- 
ist " activities in Ireland. Unfortunately for the 
moral, that constitutional demands should there- 
fore be promptly and fully conceded, the state- 
ment is almost exactly the reverse of the truth, if 
Irish history as a whole be taken as the field for 
induction. The Irish Nation cannot be said to 
have at any period abandoned its claim to inde- 
pendence. Of the meaning of that claim there 
was no question from the Conquest to the fall of 
Limerick. The whole of that period is occupied 
by a long struggle between the English and the 
Irish peoples for the effective possession of the 
island. On neither side was there any misappre- 

[I] 



hension of the meaning and object of the contest. 
The English Government, whether it employed 
naked force, intrigue or legal fiction, aimed (and 
was understood to aim) at the moral, material 
and political subjugation of the Irish: the Irish, 
whether they fought in the field or intrigued in 
the cabinets of Europe, whether allied with 
France or with Spain or English royalists, had 
but one object, the assertion of their national 
independence. It was a struggle not merely be- 
tween two nations but between two civihzations. 
Men of English blood who were absorbed by the 
Irish nation and who accepted the Irish civiliza- 
tion fought as stoutly for the independence of 
their adopted (and adopting) country as did the 
descendants of the Milesians. England could 
never count on the fidelity to her ideals and policy 
in Ireland of the second generation of her own 
settlers. History cannot produce another in- 
stance of a struggle so prolonged and so pertina- 
cious. Whole countries, stripped by fire and 
sword of their aboriginal owners, were repeopled 
within two or three generations and renewed the 
struggle. But superior numbers and organiza- 
tion, a more fortunate star and (it seemed) the 
designs of Providence, prevailed in the end; and 
with the fall of Limerick England might have re- 
garded her task as at last accomplished. The 
Irish Nation was prostrate, and chains were 

[2] 



forged for it which, heavier and more galling than 
any forged for any nation before, seemed to offer 
a perpetual guarantee of slavery, misery and deg- 
radation. Ireland was henceforth to be admin- 
istered as a kind of convict settlement. The law, 
in the words of a famous judgment, did not pre- 
sume the existence of such a person as a Catholic 
Irishman; that is to say, two-thirds of the inhab- 
itants of the country had no legal existence. 
Legal existence was the privilege of Protestant 
Enghshmen living in Ireland and of such Protes- 
tant Irishmen as claimed it. But legal existence 
In Ireland during the eighteenth century was no 
prize to be grasped at. The mere fact of resi- 
dence in Ireland entailed practical disabilities for 
which no mere local ascendancy was an adequate 
compensation. The manufactures and trade of 
Ireland were systematically and ruthlessly sup- 
pressed. Englishmen who settled there found 
that while they were at liberty to oppress " the 
mere Irish " they were subject themselves to a 
similar oppression by the English who remained 
at home. No one might enter that prison house 
and remain wholly a man. The " garrison " 
grumbled, protested and threatened, but in vain. 
Constitutionalists appealed to the policy of the 
Conquest in support of the independence of the 
country. It was argued that the Parliament of 
Ireland, established by the conquerors as a sym- 

[3] 



bol of annexation, was and ought to be independ- 
ent of the ParHament of England. The claim 
was held to be baseless and treasonable; so far 
from being abandoned or weakened, it was en- 
forced and asserted by the arms of the Volun- 
teers, and in less than a century after the fall of 
Limerick the Renunciation Act of 1783 enacted 
that the people of Ireland should be " bound only 
by laws enacted by his Majesty and the parlia- 
ment of that kingdom in all cases whatever." 

But while this was independence, it was inde- 
pendence in the sense of Molyneux, Swift and 
Grattan, not in the sense in which it had been 
understood by Hugh O'Neill. The American 
colonies went farther and fared better, and the 
descendants of the race of Hugh O'Neill had to 
be reckoned with still. Their position under the 
settlement of 1783 was what it has been since the 
Treaty of Limerick was broken by the Penal 
Laws, and all that they gained at first was an 
indirect share in the prosperity which began for 
the country with the assertion of its legislative 
independence. The population increased; trade, 
commerce and manufactures flourished and multi- 
plied; the flag of Ireland began once more to 
creep forth upon the seas; but the ancient race was 
still proscribed in the land of its birth. But 
while it was in human nature to invent, it was not 
in human nature to continue to administer, a code 

[4] 



so diabolical as that of the Penal Laws. The 
Volunteers who claimed legislative independence 
of England asserted the rights of conscience for 
their fellow-countrymen. Under the free Parlia- 
ment a gradual alleviation took place in the lot of 
Catholics in Ireland; in 1793 they were admitted 
to the franchise and there is a presumption that 
had the Irish Parliament really been independent 
the Penal Laws would have in time been abolished 
entirely. But the vigilance of English policy and 
English Ministers never ceased; their meddling 
in the affairs of Ireland was perpetual and mis- 
chievous: the rights of the Irish Parliament were 
constantly in danger from the interference of 
English Ministers who advised their common 
Monarch and molded his Irish policy through 
the Viceroy and the Executive. It was but a step 
from the admission of Catholics to the franchise 
to their admission to the House of Commons, but 
that step was never taken by the Irish Parliament. 
The measures of Parliamentary reform pressed 
upon them by the popular party both inside and 
outside Parliament were constantly rejected, 
partly through the mere conservatism of privilege, 
partly through the influence of the EngHsh 
Cabinet. The United Irishmen, whose aim was 
to estabhsh a free and equal representation of all 
Irishmen irrespective of creed, despaired of ob- 
taining their object by open agitation and, sub- 

[5] 



jected to repressive enactments, transformed 
themselves into a secret association for the over- 
throw of the existing government and for com- 
plete separation from England as the only method 
of securing and maintaining the rights of Ireland. 
They were the first Irish Republican Party. 
They appealed for assistance to the French Direc- 
tory, but so jealous were they of their independ- 
ence that they seem to have jeopardized the pros- 
pect of help by their insistence that the force sent 
must not be large enough to threaten the subju- 
gation of the country. The Government, becom- 
ing aware of the conspiracy, took, steps at once to 
foster it and to crush it. Their agents went 
through the country, forming United Irish lodges 
and then denouncing the members to the authori- 
ties. Under pretense of helping the Irish Gov- 
ernment in its difficulties, English regiments were 
poured into the country and, when a sufficient 
force was assembled, open rebellion was provoked 
and crushed with a systematic barbarity which is 
even now hardly credible. " 

To understand the Rebellion and the policy of 
the Union which followed it, one must go farther 
back than the last quarter of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. The fall of Limerick ended (or seemed to 
end) the struggle for the military domination of 
Ireland. Once it was in the effective possession 
of England the period of its commercial subjuga- 

[6] 



tion began. Every kind, of manufacture which 
competed with that of England was suppressed: 
every branch of commerce which threatened 
rivalry with that of England was forbidden. To 
ensure at once that military resistance might not 
be renewed and that commercial subjugation 
might be endured the policy was adopted first (to 
quote Archbishop Boulter) of " filling the great 
places with natives of England " and secondly of 
perpetuating the animosity between Protestants 
and Catholics. It was hoped in this way to form 
" two nations " out of one and render the task of 
government and exploitation easier in conse- 
quence. The remarkable power of absorbing 
foreign settlers shown by the Irish Nation since 
before the Conquest was thus to be nullified and 
religion pressed into service against humanity. 
So clearly was this policy conceived that Arch- 
bishop Boulter could write " The worst of this is 
that it tends to unite Protestant with Papist and, 
whenever that happens, good-by to the English 
interests in Ireland forever." But the agents of 
the policy overreached themselves. Irish Pro- 
testants turned against a policy which counted the 
merit of being a Protestant as less than the de- 
merit of being Irish. Dean Swift won the favor 
alike of Irish Protestant and Irish Catholic by his 
mordant pamphlets against the English policy in 
Ireland and may justly be reckoned as on the 

[7] 



whole the most powerful champion of Irish inde- 
pendence in the sense of the eighteenth century. 
The Irish agents of the policy of Protestant As- 
cendancy overreached themselves, too. Official 
Irish Protestantism bore almost as hardly upon 
Presbyterians as upon Papists, and the United 
Irishmen at the end of the century found no sup- 
port in Ireland warmer than that accorded them 
by the best of the Ulster Presbyterians. There 
is little doubt that the reversal of the commercial 
ascendancy by the legislation of 1782 was re- 
garded by the English Ministry as a merely tem- 
porary set-back, to be repaired at the earliest con- 
venient opportunity. In any case the valuable 
asset of Protestant Ascendancy, with its possibil- 
ities of perpetual friction and disunion among 
Irishmen, was still in their hands. When the rise 
of the United Irishmen threatened even this, the 
necessity of recovering the lost ground and the op- 
portunity of doing so were immediately recog- 
nized. The obstinacy with which the Irish Par- 
liament opposed Parliamentary reform (an ob- 
stinacy directly fostered by the policy of the Eng- 
lish Ministry) drove the United Irish movement 
into hostility at once to the English connection 
and to the existing constitution of Ireland. 
They could thus be represented as at once a men- 
ace to England and a menace to Ireland, and it 
was held to be the duty of both Governments to 

[8] 



combine to crush them. They were crushed by 
English troops, but the Irish Parliament was 
crushed with them. Pitt decided that direct con- 
trol by the English Ministry must take the place 
of indirect control through an Irish Executive, 
and the Legislative Union was enacted. There 
seemed to be no other permanent or ultimate al- 
ternative to the complete independence and sep- 
aration of England and Ireland. 

Much impressive rhetoric has been expended 
upon the measures taken to secure that the mem- 
bers of the Irish Parliament should produce a 
majority in favor of the Act of Union. They 
were bribed and intimidated; they were offered 
posts and pensions: some of them were bought 
with hard cash. But even a Castlereagh must 
have been aware that if he should suborn a serv- 
ant to betray his master the gravamen of the 
charge against him would not be that he had cor- 
rupted the morals of the servant by offering him 
a bribe. Ordinary morality may not apply to 
politics, but if it does, Pitt and Castlereagh were 
guilty of a far greater crime than that bribing of a 
few scores of venal Irishmen; and the members 
of the Irish Parliament who took their money 
were guilty not of corruption but of treason. 
For the Act of Union was intended to accomplish 
the destruction of the national existence. The 
members of Parliament who voted against it, 

[9] 



knew this: the Irish people who petitioned 
against it, knew this: Pitt and Castlereagh knew 
it: the men they paid to vote for it, knew it too. 
The politics of Ireland during the nineteenth 
century would have been tangled enough at the 
best, but the Act of Union introduced a confusion 
which has often seemed to make the situation 
inexplicable to a normal mind. But, to leave 
details aside, the main lines of the problem are 
clear enough. The Act of Union was designed to 
end the separate national existence of Ireland by 
incorporating its legislative and administrative 
machinery with that of England. To secure 
control to the "Predominant Partner" (as the 
incorporating body has since been called) the 
representation of Ireland in the Imperial Parlia- 
ment was fixed at a total which at the time of the 
Act was less than half that to which it was en- 
titled on the basis of the population. While the 
intention of the authors of the measure (as their 
published correspondence makes perfectly clear) 
was to subordinate Irish national interests to 
those of England, the measure was presented to 
Parliament as one designed to further the mutual 
interests of the two kingdoms. But to Prot- 
estant waverers it was commended in private as 
a necessary means of securing the Protestant in- 
terest, while to the Catholics hopes were held out 
that the removal of the Catholic disabilities main- 

[lo] 



tained by the Protestant ascendancy In Ireland 
might be hoped for from the more liberal Parlia- 
ment in England. There is no doubt that many 
Catholics, especially among the nobility and 
higher clergy, were induced at least to discourage 
resistance to the measure, partly for this reason, 
partly out of fear of the republican sympathies 
and aims of the reforming United Irishmen. 
The extreme Protestants, such as the Orangemen 
who helped to suppress the rebeUIon, viewed the 
measure with a certain suspicion, if not with defi- 
nite hostility. They looked forward, now that 
the rebellion was crushed, to a prolonged tenure 
of unchallenged ascendancy. But the bulk of the 
more liberal Protestants were against it, and the 
wiser Catholics. They foretold the ruin of trade, 
the burden of Increased taxation, the loss of all 
real Independence and freedom that were bound 
to, and did, result. But they were neither con- 
sulted nor listened to and the measure was passed 
after free speech had been bought over In Par- 
liament and suppressed by military force outside. 
The measure once passed brought about an un- 
natural shifting of parties in Ireland. Many of 
those who had opposed the measure before it 
became law, now decided to make the best of what 
could no longer be prevented. The orators of 
the Patriot Party passed over to the English Par- 
liament and were practically lost to Ireland. The 

[II] 



aristocracy who had upheld the Irish Parliament 
gravitated towards the new seat of Government 
and abandoned a capital deserted by the Parlia- 
ment of their pride. They sent their children to 
be educated in England, and in the second genera- 
tion they began to call themselves not Irishmen 
but Englishmen. The representatives of both 
these parties became in time convinced upholders 
of the Union and their influence in Ireland was 
thrown in favor of the maintenance of the status 
quo. To this " Unionist " party must be added 
the Orange party who stood for Protestant 
ascendancy. Much as they disliked the Union 
to begin with they came to see in the end that, 
unaided, they could not stand for long against the 
claim of their Catholic fellow-countrymen for 
political equality. The one thing that reconciled 
them to the Union was its possibilities in securing 
the Protestant interest. To this attitude they 
have remained faithful ever since, and in the 
course of the century they were joined by the ma- 
jority of the Protestants of Ireland. Ulster, at 
one time the chief strength of the United Irish- 
men, became the headquarters of extreme and 
even fanatical support of the Union. Here " the 
Protestant Interest," carefully fostered as an in- 
strument of English influence in Ireland, founded 
its citadel, the rallying point of opposition to 
" Irish " claims. After Connaught, the most 

[12] 



definitely " Celtic " portion of Ireland in spite of 
the Ulster Plantations, its extreme Protestant 
sympathies, carefully fostered by the Protestant 
clergy into a bigotry that has become grotesque, 
converted the dominions of the O'Neills and the 
O'Donnells into a desperate and apparently ir- 
reconcilable antagonist of Irish national interests. 
Besides, Ulster suffered less than the rest of Ire- 
land from the economic effects of the Union. 
Though the population of Ulster has been almost 
halved as the result of it, the " Ulster custom " 
saved the tenants from some of the worst abuses 
of the land system of the other provinces, and the 
prosperity of the linen trade, never endangered by 
collision with English interests, did not suffer by 
the measure; while the greater wealth of the man- 
ufacturing districts made the burden of unfair 
taxation (which repressed commercial and indus- 
trial, enterprise in the rest of Ireland) less felt 
than it might have been. A mistaken view of 
their own interests, and an equally mistaken view 
of the real aims of the rest of their countrymen 
(a mistake sometimes encouraged by the tactics of 
their opponents) converted Protestant Ulster into 
an attitude which ignorance has represented as a 
consciousness of a racial difference between itself 
and the rest of Ireland. But even in Ulster there 
still remain many Protestant Irishmen to whom 
the recollection of the days of the United Irish- 

[13] 



men is like the recollection of the Golden Age. 
Still faithful to the doctrines of equality, frater- 
nity and freedom they are the last links of the 
chain which once bound Ulster to the cause of 
Ireland. 

On the other hand Catholic Ireland as a whole, 
and especially its leaders, ecclesiastical and other, 
viewed the enactment of the legislative Union with 
a kind of apathetic despair. Nothing apparently 
was to be hoped from the Irish Parliament in 
the direction of real religious equality or reform 
of the franchise : nothing more could be expected 
from armed resistance after the signal failure of 
the rebellion. The country was occupied by an 
English army and, whatever they thought, they 
must think in silence. Hopes were laid out that 
the Union might bring Catholic Emancipation, 
that the Catholic clergy might receive a State sub- 
sidy similar to that given to the Presbyterian 
ministers. They were to find that Catholic 
Emancipation was no more to the taste of 
England than to that of the Irish Parliament 
and that a State subsidy to the Catholic Church 
would only be granted at the price which Castle- 
reagh desired the Presbyterian ministers to pay 
for the Regiiim Donum. But for the moment 
they did nothing and there was nothing that could 
be done. Entitled to vote but not to sit in Parlia- 
ment, but half-emancipated from the bondage, 

[14] 



material and moral, of the Penal Laws, they had 
no effective weapon at their disposal within the 
constitution, and the only other weapon that they 
had had broken in their hands. They were forced 
into a position of silent and half-hearted protest, 
and have ever since been at the disadvantage of 
having to appear as the disturbers of the existing 
order. The hopes held out by the promoters of 
the Union were not realized without prolonged 
and violent agitation, and the cause of Ireland ap- 
peared doubly alien, clothed in the garb of a 
Church alien to the legislators to whom appeal 
was made. That the national cause was first 
identified with the claims of Irish Catholics to re- 
ligious equality is the damnosa hereditas of Irish 
Nationalism in the nineteenth century. The 
music of " the Pope's Brass Band " drowns the 
voice of orator and poet. The demand that the 
nation as a whole should no longer be compelled 
to support the establishment of the Church of a 
minority was represented as a move on the part of 
the Roman Curia to cripple Protestantism in the 
United Kingdom. The demand for the reform 
of the worst land system in Europe was looked 
upon as a resistance to the constitution inspired by 
the agents of the Vatican. The Irish people ask 
for nothing, but the Pope or the Irish Catholic 
hierarchy, working in darkness, is supposed to 
have put it into their heads, though the Irish peo- 

[15] 



pie have taught both Pope and Bishops many les- 
sons upon the distinction between rehgious author- 
ity and political dictation. 

Thus there gradually developed during the nine- 
teenth century the Unionist and the Nationalist 
parties, the former upholding the legislative 
Union though not averse (upon pressure) to the 
concession of administrative reforms: the latter 
under many forms claiming in greater or lesser 
measure the abolition of the fons et origo ma- 
lorum, the withdrawal from the people of Ireland 
of the right to an independent legislature. The 
historic claim to complete independence has on 
many occasions been modified in theory or abated 
in practice by the National leaders: but a survey 
of the history of Ireland since the Union shows 
that, with whatever apparent abatements or dis- 
guises the claim may have been pressed, there has 
always been deep down the feeling that behind 
the Union lay the Conquest, the hope that to re- 
peal the one meant a step upon the road to annul 
the other. 



[i6] 



IRISH NATIONALISM IN THE NINE- 
TEENTH CENTURY 

The political history of Post-Union Ireland 
opens with an armed rebellion. Robert Emmet, 
for an abortive attempt to seize Dublin Castle 
was condemned and executed in 1803. His rising 
was the last effort of the United Irishmen. Since 
the Union, and for more than a century after his 
death, the country was governed under a species 
of martial law, and Coercion Acts were matters of 
almost annual enactment. The Government 
could not count on the steady loyalty of any class 
of the community. The Orange societies required 
to be placated, the Presbyterians to be muzzled, 
the Catholics to be suppressed. Castlereagh's ad- 
ministration was a frank recognition of the fact 
that Irishmen as a body were hostile to the Union, 
and that any means might be employed to keep 
them quiet. For more than twenty years the 
Catholics waited in vain for the fulfilment of the 
hopes of emancipation held out at the time of the 
Union. Meanwhile '* the bonds of Empire " con- 
tinued to be drawn tighter and tighter. In 18 17 
the Irish Exchequer, the belated relic of Ireland's 
independent existence, was amalgamated with 

[17] 



that of England, and the long history of the 
financial oppression of the country began. At 
last in 1823 Catholic Ireland began the public 
agitation of its claims for civil equality with Irish 
Protestants. The agitation, justifiable and neces- 
sary in itself, natural and dignified had it taken 
place in an independent Ireland and had it been 
of the nature of an appeal to the justice of their 
fellow-countrymen, assumed the inevitable form of 
an appeal to a foreign legislature for a justice 
denied them at home. The Catholic Association 
founded in 1760 was revived by Daniel O'Connell 
and in six years' time, so strong was the feeling 
aroused, the English Government yielded, for fear 
(as the Duke of Wellington confessed) of a civil 
war. O'Connell had talked as if he were ready 
for anything and the Duke of WeUington seems 
to have thought that he meant what he said. It 
was the first victory for " moral force " and 
O'Connell became enamored of the new weapon. 
Next year the Tithe War broke out and ended in 
1838 in an incomplete victory, the Tithes, instead 
of being aboHshed, being paid henceforth in 
money as an addition to the rent. But before the 
Tithe War ended, O'Connell (now member for 
Clare in the Imperial Parliament) had founded 
the Constitutional Party by giving his support to 
Lord Melbourne's Government. For O'Connell's 
policy there was this to be said: that, the Union 

[18] 



being an accomplished fact, the only way to secure 
legislative benefits for Ireland was through the 
only means recognized by the constitution : that, 
both English parties being equally indifferent to 
the special interests of Ireland, it was sound 
practical policy to secure by an alliance with one 
or other, as occasion might dictate, some special 
claim upon its consideration and (incidentally) 
some hope of appointments to Government posi- 
tions of Irishmen in sympathy with the majority 
in Ireland: that the only alternative was open de- 
fiance of the Constitution and the sacrifice of 
what otherwise might be gained by its recognition. 
Against his policy it could be urged that to employ 
constitutional forms was to recognize a constitu- 
tion repugnant to his declared convictions; that 
appeals to the Parliament of the United Kingdom 
tended in practice to intensify Irish divisions and 
to break up the nation into two groups of litigants 
pleading before a bar which viewed them with an 
indifferent disdain; that in any case success in the 
appeal would be the result of accident and circum- 
stance or be dictated by the interests of English 
policy. Between these two views of Irish national 
policy Ireland has been divided and has wavered 
ever since. 

But O'Connell, having been successful once, 
seems to have conceived it possible to be successful 
always, and he decided to attempt the Repeal of 

[19] 



the Union. It is hard to suppose that he thought 
this possible by any means which he was prepared 
to use. In 1840 he founded the Repeal Associa- 
tion, and in two years' time he had practically the 
whole of Catholic Ireland, and a small but en- 
thusiastic body of Protestants, behind him. 
Monster meetings were held all over the country. 
Repeal Clubs were founded, recruits pressed in, 
" moral force," in the form of threats that " he 
would either be in his grave or a freeman" within 
a reasonable time, was employed by the leader. 
But when the Government proclaimed the meeting, 
announced to be held on Sunday, October the 8th, 
1843, 'It Clontarf, chosen as the scene of Brian 
Boroimhe's crowning victory over the Danes, 
O'Connell yielded at discretion. No reform, as 
he proclaimed afterwards, was worth the shedding 
of a single drop of human blood; and Brian's 
battlefield saw the troops wait all day long for the 
foe that never came. Unable to persuade, 
O'Connell was unprepared to fight, the enemies of 
Repeal. But the Repeal Association continued: 
the Repeal members of Parliament either were 
(like O'Connell) arrested and imprisoned or 
withdrew from Westminster to deliberate in Ire- 
land upon Committees of the Repeal Association 
on matters of national moment. As time went 
on, O'Connell (and still more his worthless son, 
John) gave the Association an ever-increasing 

[20] 



bias towards sectarianism and away from Nation- 
alism. He fought the " Young Ireland " Party, 
as Davis, Gavan Duffy, John Mitchel and their 
associates were called, who carried on the purely 
national and liberal traditions of the United Irish- 
men, and finally forced them to secede. Their 
paper The Nation, founded in 1842, was until its 
suppression the mouthpiece of the Liberal and 
really National Party. It voiced in impassioned 
prose and verse the aspirations of the historic 
Irish nation. Its guiding spirit, Thomas Davis, 
was a member of a Protestant family in Mallow, 
and its contributors comprised men of all creeds, 
Irish and Anglo-Irish, who looked forward to the 
revival of Irish culture, of the Irish language and 
of an Irish polity in which room would be found 
for all sons and daughters of Ireland, free to de- 
velop as one of the family of European nations, 
released from all outside interference in national 
concerns. But Irish divisions, fostered by the 
Union, fomented by statecraft and furthered by 
many Irishmen, grew steadily more pronounced. 
Thomas Davis and his friends, at the risk of mis- 
understanding and misrepresentation, did their ut- 
most to promote union on the basis of a com- 
mon pride in Ireland's past and a common hope 
for Ireland's future. The Committees of the Re- 
peal Association worked hard at reports upon 
Irish needs and Irish conditions. They promoted 

[21] 



the composition and publication of Repeal Essays 
pointing to the results of the Union in diminish- 
ing manufactures and in an impoverished national 
life. They had a temporary success, and their 
writings were destined to supply inspiration to 
their successors, but they were battling with a 
running tide. The moderate people, tired of the 
struggle, were finding in Federalism a resting place 
between conviction and expediency or had made 
up their minds to accept the Union. The gradual 
process of Anglicization went on apace. The 
establishment in 1831 of the Board of National 
Education under the joint management of Catho- 
lic, Protestant and Presbyterian dignitaries was, 
in spite of much opposition, making sure headway. 
It was destined to destroy for all practical pur- 
poses the Gaelic language which till then had been 
in common use in all parts of Ireland. It pro- 
scribed Irish history and Irish patriotic poetry in 
its schools. It was seized upon by ecclesiastics of 
all persuasions and made, in the name of religion, 
a potent instrument of a policy of internal division 
and mistrust. It placed education, with all its 
possibilities of national culture and national union, 
in the hands of a Board definitely anti-national in 
Its outlook, working through Instruments to whom 
sectarian prejudices meant more than national 
welfare. Had Davis lived he might have done 
much with his great gifts, his tolerant spirit and 

[22] 



his heroic temper: his death in 1845 was one of 
the greatest losses which Ireland suffered during 
the nineteenth century. O'Connell, whose later 
activities had been almost wholly mischievous, 
died two years later just as the full horror of the 
Famine burst upon the country. The Govern- 
ment which had assumed responsibility for the in- 
terests of Ireland, met this awful visitation with 
an ineptitude so callous as almost to justify John 
Mitchel's fiercest denunciations. While the crops 
were being exported from the country over 700,- 
000 persons died of starvation and as many again 
by famine fever. When the fever and famine 
had done their work, the clearances began. The 
population fled from the country where there was 
nothing left for them or, if they did not fly, they 
were shipped off by the landlords to leave room 
for thq development of grazing farms. From 
1846 to 185 1, one million and a quarter of the 
population " emigrated," and in the next nine 
years they were followed, thanks to the same 
causes, by another million and a half. During the 
same period 373,000 families were evicted from 
their holdings to provide room for a handful of 
graziers. 

The Famine and its consequences seemed a 
final proof of the failure of the Enghsh Govern- 
ment to preserve the elementary interests of Ire- 
land, and a section of the Young Irelanders could 

[23] 



see no other remedy than an appeal to force, if 
they were to regain independence and keep Ire- 
land from destruction. John Mitchel seceded 
from The Nation and founded The United Irish- 
yuan, in which week after week with extraordinary 
eloquence and courage he advocated the policy of 
resistance. He advised the peasantry to procure 
arms, to manufacture pikes, if nothing better 
could be had, to resist the official searches for 
arms (for a stringent Coercion Act had been one 
of the weapons with which the Government com- 
bated the Famine) and to refuse to allow food to 
leave the country. He appealed in a series of 
letters to the Protestant farmers of Ulster to 
help Ireland as they had helped before in the days 
of the United Irishmen. Had all the leaders of 
the Young Ireland Party possessed the spirit of 
Mitchel, and had any of them known how to 
organize a rebellion, they would not have lacked 
a very formidable following. But Mitchel was 
arrested, sentenced and transported before any- 
thing was done and the actual outbreak under 
Smith O'Brien and Meagher was doomed to fail- 
ure from the outset. 

Mitchel had advanced far beyond " moral 
force " and the Repeal of the Union. He had 
definitely renounced the idea of arguing the Union 
out of existence: he regarded no policy as either 
practicable or manly which did not begin and end 

[24] 



in the assertion that Ireland was a free country 
and was prepared to adopt any and every means 
to put her freedom into practice. Like all the 
Young Irelanders, he had begun his political life 
as a Repealer and a follower of O'Connell; he 
had appealed to the Irish gentry to act again as 
they had acted in 1782. But Irish history since 
the Union and especially the experiences of the 
Famine years (there had been several partial 
famines before 1846) was making some serious 
thinkers very skeptical of a political solution, 
which left one of the main factors of politics out 
of account. The man who saw the defects of the 
Repeal solution and exposed them most trench- 
antly and convincingly was James Fintan Lalor. 
In a series of letters and articles written for The 
Nation and for the Irish Felon he expounded a 
theory of nationality which went to the very roots 
of poHtical facts. His policy was not Repeal; " I 
will never," he said, " contribute one shilling or 
give my name, heart, or hand, for such an object 
as the simple repeal by the British Parliament of 
the Act of Union." The facts of everyday life 
in Ireland showed that a new social system was 
required, the old having had its day. " There 
was no outrise or revolt against it. It was not 
broken up by violence. It was borne for ages 
with beggarly patience, until it perished by the 
irritation of God in the order of nature." So 

[25] 



long as a system remained In which the land of 
Ireland was not In possession of the people of 
Ireland, no repeal or other measure purely politi- 
cal would avail. If the landlords were to remain 
(and Lalor had no desire to expel them If they 
were willing to submit to the paramount right of 
the nation) they must accept their titles to what- 
ever rights should be theirs from the Irish nation 
and the Irish nation only. " The principle I state, 
and mean to stand upon, is this" (he wrote) " that 
the entire ownership of Ireland, moral and ma- 
terial, up to the sun and down to the center, Is 
vested of right in the people of Ireland; that they, 
and none but they, are the landowners and law- 
makers of this island; that all laws are null and 
void not made by them, and all titles to land In- 
valid not conferred and confirmed by them; and 
that this full right of ownership may and ought 
to be asserted and enforced by any and all means 
which God has put In the power of man." The 
coming of the lean years culminating in the 
Famine had taught Lalor the overwhelming Im- 
portance of the question: "A revolution is be- 
ginning to begin which will leave Ireland without 
a people unless it be met and conquered by a revo- 
lution which will leave it without landlords." 
Failure to observe (or to see the importance of) 
the land question had led to the defeat of Mitchel 
and Smith O'Brien. " They wanted an alliance 

[26] 



with the landowners. They chose to consider 
them as Irishmen, and imagined they could induce 
them to hoist the green flag. They wished to 
preserve an Aristocracy. They desired, not a 
democratic, but merely a national revolution. 
Who imputes blame to them for this? Whoever 
does so will not have me to join him. I have no 
feeling but one of respect for the motives that 
caused reluctance and delay. That delay, how- 
ever, I consider as a matter of deep regret. Had 
the Confederation, in the May or June of '47, 
thrown heart and mind and means and might into 
the movement I pointed out, they would have 
made it successful, and settled at once and forever 
all quarrels and questions between us and Eng- 
land." But though Lalor insisted on the import- 
ance of the question of the ownership of the soil 
and confessed complete indifference to Repeal, an 
indifference which he claimed was largely shared 
by the people of Ireland (for Repeal, as he said, 
the Irish! wolf dog " will never bite, but only 
bark ") he was a land reformer, not out of a lack 
of interest in political questions, but out of an 
intense belief in the realities of politics. He 
never joined the Repealers, partly because O'Con- 
nell and his following disgusted him; as he says 
in a letter to Gavan Duffy: " Before I embarked 
In the boat I looked at the crew and the com- 
mander; the same boat which you and others mis- 

,[27] 



took in '43 for a war frigate because she hoisted; 
gaudy colors and that her captain swore terribly. 
I knew her at once for a leaky collier-smack, with 
a craven crew to man her, and a sworn dastard and 
a forsworn traitor at the helm — a fact which 
you and Young Ireland would seem never to have 
discovered until he ordered the boat to be stranded 
and yourselves to be set ashore." This language 
may be unnecessarily vigorous and hurtful but the 
judgment is not essentially unjust. But it was 
not merely disgust which kept Lalor out of the 
Repeal ranks. He disbelieved utterly in the Re- 
peal of the Union as a solution for the Irish ques- 
tion. It was in the first place impracticable. 
" You will never, in form of law, repeal the 
Act of Union. Never, while the sun sits in 
heaven, and the laws of nature are in action. 
Never, before night goes down on the last day." 
What was, however, practicable was to claim the 
land, refuse to pay rent for It, and institute a pro- 
tracted, obstinate and violent resistance to the at- 
tempt on the part of English troops to take it 
back again. Once the land was again in the 
possession of the people of Ireland their ultimate 
policy would be clear. " Not the repeal of the 
Union, then, but the Conquest — not to disturb or 
dismantle the Empire, but to abolish it utterly for- 
ever — not to fall back on '82 but act up to '48 — 
not to resume or restore an old constitution, but 

[28] 



found a new nation and raise up a free people, and 
strong as well as free, and secure as well as strong, 
based on a peasantry rooted like rocks In the soil 
of the land — this is my object." " Not the con- 
stitution that Wolfe Tone died to abolish, but the 
constitution that Wolfe Tone died to obtain — 
independence ; full and absolute Independence for 
this Island, and for every man within this island." 
Lalor knew well enough that this meant fighting 
in the long run, but he thought that It was worth 
fighting for while Repeal of the Union was not: 
but who was to lead the fight? Little was to be 
looked for from the Repeal leaders, content with 
" a small Dublin reputation," with neither the 
desire nor the talents to lead a nation. His last 
article In the Irish Felon, written while Smith 
O'Brien and Meagher were in prison, Is an im- 
passioned appeal for some one to lead a nation 
that was only waiting for a man. " Remember 
this — that somewhere and somehow and by 
somebody, a beginning must be made. Who 
strikes the first blow for Ireland? Who draws 
first blood for Ireland? Who wins a wreath that 
will be green forever? " 

The perenni fronde corona which Lalor 
promised has not yet been won and may never be 
won by the means which Lalor thought of, but the 
influence of his writings upon later Irish political 
thought has been profound. The Repeal Move- 

[29] 



ment brought out three men of real genius 
— Davis, Mitchel and Lalor. Davis was always 
more than a simple Repealer; his mind took in 
too great a range, his knowledge was too wide, 
his commonsense too great, to see in Repeal of 
the Union the ultimate end of Irish political en- 
deavor. Mitchel abandoned Repeal for Revolu- 
tion in hot blood and out of a haughty heart. 
Lalor had the cool head and the keen eye and the 
sense of reality which Mitchel lacked: but 
though he wrote less and did less and suffered 
less, what he lost in immediate reputation he 
gained in his influence over a later age and in a 
wider field. 

The situation of Ireland in the years imme- 
diately following the Famine was tragic. On the 
one side was starvation, impotence, despair. The 
starvation might have been, and in any normally 
governed country would have been, averted: but 
Ireland was in the unnatural position of being 
governed by outsiders who had absolutely no in- 
terest in the country beyond that of ensuring that 
it should not govern itself: seeing the remedy for 
its misery, but unable to employ it, in the face of 
an army which not all the fiery eloquence of 
Mitchel and Meagher could persuade the starving 
people was capable of being defeated by a mob of 
pikemen, Ireland sank back into an apathetic and 
moody despair from which it took many years to 

[30] 



recover, during which the life of the nation almost 
drained away. On the other side was the Govern- 
ment, indifferent to the misery of Its victim, de- 
termined that nothing, not even the extinction of 
the race, should alter the fixed resolve of England 
to be absolute and sole master in Ireland. The 
failure of the Rebellion of '48 was not to the 
rulers of England a matter altogether of congrat- 
ulation. A highly-placed personage, able to 
gauge with accuracy the sentiment of the English 
ruling classes, wrote: " There are ample means of 
crushing the rebellion in Ireland and I think it is 
now very likely to go off without any contest, 
which people (and I think with right) rather 
regret. The Irish should receive a good lesson 
or they will begin again." The awful mortality 
from famine and pestilence was regarded with a 
kind of chastened and reverential gratitude, as an 
unexpected interference of Providence for the 
extirpation of the hated race. In the then temper 
of England no revolution had the least chance of 
sympathy or success. It would have been 
crushed, whatever the cost. 

But though prostrate, despairing and depleted 
Ireland still claimed her rights, though for a few 
years it seemed as if they had been tacitly waived. 
The Repeal agitation died, and its place was taken 
by the Irish Tenant League which aimed not at 
interference with constitutional arrangements but 

[31] 



at the solution of the land question, not In the 
radical method advocated by Lalor but by legisla- 
tion securing certain rights to the tenant, the 
claim of the landlord to be owner of the land 
being left untouched. Lalor had foretold that 
on the land question Ulster Instead of being " on 
the flank " of the rest of Ireland would march 
with It side by side: and Gavan Duffy in his 
League of the North and South went some length 
in the way of securing the cooperation of the 
Northern Tenant Rlghters. At the same time the 
Irish representatives In Parliament formed the be- 
ginning of an Independent Parliamentary Party, 
holding aloof from any binding alliance with 
either English Party but combining at need with 
the party most favorable at the moment to Irish 
claims. But the new policy proved a failure with- 
in three years, partly by the treachery of members 
of the party, but chiefly through the inherent hope- 
lessness of the position of any Irish party then in 
Parliament. Besides, the Tenant League had to 
contend with the masterful personality of Cardinal 
Cullen, an ecclesiastic of the Ultramontane 
School, who spent his life in the endeavor, tem- 
porarily successful, to throw the whole weight of 
his Church against the just claims of the nation. 
During the abortive attempt at a constitutional 
policy, the survivors of the party of Mitchel and 
Lalor were not idle. It cannot be said that Ire- 

[32] 



land had at this time come to recognize the futility 
or parliamentary agitation, for it cannot be said 
to have given it a sufficient trial: but the results of 
It had so far been disappointing, and the tradition 
of independence was still fresh, and its spirit 
strong. The new form which was assumed by the 
Separatist movement after the failure of '48 was 
that known as the Fenian Society, or the Irish Re- 
pubhcan Brotherhood. Its chief organizers, 
James Stephens, John Mahony, John O'Leary and 
Thos. Clarke Luby had all been " out " In '48. 
Stephens and O'Mahony had lived in Paris till 
1850; Stephens then returned to Ireland, gaining 
his living as a teacher of French, while O'Mahony 
went to New York. Both in Ireland and New 
York the teaching of the two friends found ready 
listeners, and an amazing success. The Irish in 
America were only too ready to return to Ireland 
to overthrow the Government In whose authority 
they saw the source of their country's misfortunes 
and their own exile. On the conclusion of the 
American War thousands of Irishmen who had 
fought under Grant or Jackson were ready to 
place their services at the disposal of an Irish 
leader. But they found no one of sufficient ability 
and prestige to lead them. Smith O'Brien and 
the other survivors of the Young Ireland Party 
had become constitutionalists. John Mitchel, 
though he went to Paris to act as treasurer for the 

[33] 



Society, refused to take any more active part. 
O'Mahony and the Americans wanted to equip 
and despatch an expedition: James Stephens, who 
had undertaken to organize the movement in Ire- 
land, insisted that American assistance should be 
confined to money. The money came in slowly 
and though Stephens could enroll a revolutionary 
army he could not equip it. The Americans, too, 
wanted the rising to take place before Stephens 
thought the time was ripe, and the consequent 
quarrel between the Irish and American leaders 
was fatal to the chance of success. In any case 
little real progress was made until the year 1865, 
but the work of preparation went steadily on. 
The organization in Ireland, which at first was 
without a name, the oath of membership being 
merely an oath of allegiance to the Irish Republic, 
was formally inaugurated on St. Patrick's Day, 
1858. In 1859 the Government, becoming 
alarmed, broke up the Phoenix Society of Skib- 
bereen, an independent organization, and the 
members later on joined the Fenians. All the 
forces of the Church and the Influence of such 
recognized leaders as were left were arrayed 
against the new organization. Fenians were re- 
fused the rites of the Church for being members 
of a secret oath-bound society, and at least one 
member has left upon record that having to 
choose between Faith and Country he chose 

[34] 



Country. The Fenians boldly defied Cardinal 
CuUen and his clerical agents. The Irish People, 
founded in 1862 under John O'Leary as editor, 
took up the Cardinal's challenge and faced con- 
sistently and courageously the question of " the 
priest in politics." It did incalculable service to 
the Fenians by its courage and frankness. In the 
same year Belfast and Ulster were brought within 
the Fenian Circle. By 1865 there were, it was 
claimed, 13,000 sworn Fenians in the army, rather 
more in the militia, and a good many of the police 
had joined as well. Stephens judged it time to 
prepare, for action, but his despatches to the 
country ordering preparations to begin fell into 
the hands of the police. The office of the Irish 
People was seized, Habeas Corpus was suspended 
and the jails were filled. Stephens himself was 
arrested some weeks afterwards. After his 
escape from Richmond Prison he lay hid for three 
months in Ireland and then escaped to France and 
America. Whether better fortune would have 
crowned his work if he had gone on in spite of 
the arrests is a nice question. Some at any rate 
of his followers judged that he had missed his 
chance. The subsequent attempt in '67 under 
American leaders fared no better; and General 
Massey, arrested at Limerick Junction, judged it 
better to avoid bloodshed by giving full informa- 
tion to the Government. 

[35] 



The Fenian Movement, as it was called, was 
both in Ireland and America avowedly republican 
and separatist from the very first. Stephens 
wished to establish one form of government only 
— an Irish Republic, and he believed in only one 
method — that of armed revolution. He refused 
steadily to have anything to do with tenant rights 
or parliamentary parties or tactics. 

The avowed object of the Republican Brother- 
hood had failed, but it brought about two meas- 
ures of Irish reform, long agitated and overdue, 
but neglected until the events of ^6^ and '67 
brought home to a disdainful Parliament the reali- 
ties of the abuses and of the feelings which their 
continuance had aroused. The Irish Church Act 
and Mr. Gladstone's first Land Bill were due to 
the Fenians. They were not formally concessions 
to Fenianism, as the Fenians were concerned first 
of all to establish a Republic and then to decide 
upon reforms for themselves; the Government 
merely supposed that by mending two intolerable 
abuses they could cut the ground from under the 
revolutionary movement. This policy could be 
only partially successful ; but it succeeded so far 
that for a period of thirty years there was no 
Irish party that openly and consistently pro- 
claimed its adhesion to the doctrine of complete 
separation. 

The Home Rule policy put forward by Isaac 

[36] 



Butt in 1870 fell far short even of O'Connell's 
Repeal. Its object was to set up, not an inde- 
pendent, but a strictly subordinate, Parliament in 
Dublin: the effect of this proposal (whatever its 
authors may have intended) would have been to 
consolidate the Union by removing opportunities 
of friction and of discontent. But even the ap- 
pearance of a reversal of the policy of the Union 
was distasteful to Parliament; and the Irish mem- 
bers exhausted themselves In providing an annual 
exhibition of eloquence and passion for the delec- 
tation of a languid or tolerant audience. The 
pathetic and humiliating performance was ended 
by the appearance of Charles Stewart Parnell who 
infused into the forms of Parliamentary action the 
sacred fury of battle. He determined that Ire- 
land, refused the right of managing her own 
destinies, should at least hamper the English in the 
government of their own house: he struck at the 
dignity of Parliament and wounded the suscepti- 
bilities of Englishmen by his assault upon the in- 
stitution of which they are most justly proud. 
His policy of parliamentary obstruction went hand 
in hand with an advanced land agitation at home. 
The remnant of the Fenian Party rallied to his 
cause and suspended for the time, in his interests 
and in furtherance of his policy, their revolution- 
ary activities. For Parnell appealed to them by 
his honest declaration of his intentions : he made it 

[37] 



plain both to Ireland and to the Irish in America 
that his policy was no mere attempt at a readjust- 
ment of details in Anglo-Irish relations but the 
first step on the road to national independence. 
He was strong enough both to announce his ulti- 
mate intentions and to define with precision the 
limit which must be placed upon the immediate 
measures to be taken. During the years in which 
he was at the head of the National Movement 
practically all sections of Nationalists ac- 
knowledged his leadership and his policy. If he 
was not able to control all the extreme elements 
that grouped themselves under his banner it was 
no more than might have been expected. Neither 
he nor the Irish Republican Brotherhood was re- 
sponsible for the murders perpetrated by the In- 
vincibles, who had no connection or sympathy 
with the Fenian policy; but their excesses were 
used, and used with effect, to damage not only 
Parnell's position but the claims of Ireland. It 
was he himself who gave to his enemies in the 
end the only fatal weapon which they could use 
against him: but the prompt use of it by his own 
party was a portentous event in Irish politics. 
For the first time the Irish people not alone con- 
formed to the exigencies of an alhance with an 
English party, but allowed that party to veto 
their choice of a leader. Parnell himself had 
once said " As the air of London would eat away 

[38] 



the stone walls of the House of Commons, so 
would the atmosphere of the House eat away the 
honor and honesty of the Irish members." Cer- 
tainly the tortuous ways of party politics had de- 
stroyed their loyalty, and though a small band 
proved faithful to him in spite of the Liberal veto, 
the majority came to a decision, practically dic- 
tated by the Irish hierarchy and acquiesced in 
(even if reluctantly) by a majority of his country- 
men, to terminate his position as leader. But, 
though this betrayal seemed to have destroyed the 
cause, for which he had fought, It may be 
questioned whether it was really more than a 
symptom of the inherent weakness of his position. 
The utmost he could gain in the direction of Home 
Rule, the utmost anyone could have gained under 
the limitations which he himself imposed upon his 
policy, fell markedly short of the minimum which 
a majority of his followers thought attainable at 
once and of what he himself announced to be the 
ultimate object of his policy. He Is remembered, 
not as the leader who helped to force a Liberal 
Government to produce two Home Rule Bills, 
but as the leader who said " No man can set 
bounds to the march of a nation." 

The death of Parnell marks the end of an 
epoch. A strong, romantic and mysterious per- 
sonality, he won and kept the affections of the 
Irish people in a way which had been possible to 

[39] 



few leaders before him and which none has at- 
tained since. The history of Irish politics for 
years after his death was a story largely of small 
intrigue, base personalities, divided counsels and 
despairing expedients; and the policy which event- 
ually emerged, for which Mr. John Redmond was 
responsible, was widely removed from that of 
Parnell. The policy to which Mr. Redmond's 
adhesion was given was that of a Home Rule 
which might be described as " Home Rule within 
the Union," a Home Rule which in return for a 
local legislature and internal control, resigned to 
the Imperial Parliament all claim to the right to 
a foreign policy and to all that would raise Ire- 
land above the level of an inferior dependency. 
It is true that Parnell would have obtained little 
more than this, if he had lived; but he would have 
obtained it in a different way and would have ac- 
cepted the concession with a gesture of independ- 
ence. Post-Parnellite Home Rule has been based 
largely upon the ground that a better understand- 
ing between the two countries is desirable in the 
interests of both; that government in Ireland is 
less efficient, more costly, less appreciated that it 
would be if it were administered by the people of 
Ireland themselves, with a due regard to the in- 
terests and general policy of the Empire; its justi- 
fication Is found in the success of the self-govern- 
ing colonies who, thanks to being responsible for 

[40] 



their own affairs, are contented, prosperous and 
loyal partners in an Imperial Commonwealth. 
All this is true, but it is a truth that would have 
carried no meaning to the mind of Parnell. To 
him the British Empire was an abstraction in 
which Ireland had no spiritual concern; it formed 
part of the order of the material world in which 
Ireland found a place; it had, like the climatic 
conditions of Europe, or the Gulf Stream, a real 
and preponderating influence on the destinies of 
Ireland. But the Irish claim was to him the 
claim of a nation to its inherent rights, not the 
claim of a portion of an empire to its share in the 
benefits which the constitution of that empire be- 
stowed upon its more favored parts. For some 
years after Parnell's death the leaders of the Irish 
Parhamentary Party felt obliged to maintain the 
continuity of tradition by using the language of 
the claim for independence and to speak of 
" severing the last link " which bound Ireland to 
England; but even in America and Ireland such 
expressions were heard less and less often from 
official Nationalists. The final attitude of the 
Irish Parliamentary Party is admirably summed 
up in the words of Mr. John Redmond: "Our 
demand for Home Rule does not mean that we 
want to break with the British Empire. We are 
entirely loyal to the Empire as such and we desire 
to strengthen the Imperial bonds through a liberal 

[41] 



system of government. We do not demand such 
complete local autonomy as the British self- 
governing colonies possess, for we are willing to 
forego the right to make our own tariffs and are 
prepared to abide by any fiscal system enacted by 
the British Parliament . . . Once we re- 
ceive Home Rule we shall demonstrate our im- 
perial loyalty beyond question." 

Ten years before these words were used the 
Sinn Fein movement had begun, as a protest 
against the conception of national rights which 
made such language possible, as the latest form 
which the assertion of national independence has 
assumed. 



[42] 



SINN FEIN 

Of the origin of this name as the title of a po- 
litical party a pleasant tale is told. It is said 
that some people, convinced that (in the words 
of Davis) " the freeman's friend is Self-Reliance," 
and wishing to make it the basis of a national 
movement, being anxious for a suitable Irish name 
for such an idea, applied to a famous Irish scholar 
to furnish it. He told them a story of a country 
servant in Munster sent with a horse to the fair. 
The horse was sold and the servant after some 
days appeared in his master's kitchen, worn out 
but happy, and seated himself on the floor. To 
the inquiries of some neighbors who happened to 
be there, as to where he had been and what he 
had done, he would give no answer but " Sinn 
fein sinn fein." The prodigal servant's witty 
reply eludes the translator. To his hearers it 
conveyed that family matters were matters for the 
family: but it was no mere evasion of a temporary 
or personal difficulty. It was the expression of a 
universal truth. Society is divided into groups, 
large or small, which have their own problems 
and their own interests. Their problems they can 
best solve themselves, and of their interests they 

[43] 



are themselves the best judges. The solutions 
and the judgments will not always commend them- 
selves to outsiders; but though outsiders cannot 
be denied the right to hold and to express their 
opinions they have no rights of veto or of inter- 
ference. This right of independence, however, is 
subject in practice to serious limitations, and the 
history of human society is largely the history of 
the reconciliation of the competing interests and 
claims of social groups, each claiming to be in the 
last resort rightfully independent. One of such 
groups is the nation, and it is generally recognized 
that nations as such have rights analogous to those 
exercised by other social groups. They may be 
forcibly deprived by another and stronger group 
of rights the exercise of which seems to the 
stronger to be inimical to its own interests; or 
rights may be surrendered in return for which may 
be judged to be a fair equivalent. But it is not 
held that rights can be extinguished by force or 
that, if a suitable opportunity should occur, they 
may not be regained either by force or by agree- 
ment. These things are generally acknowledged 
in the abstract; but in concrete instances there is 
seldom an equal unanimity: and a nation whose 
rights are in abeyance (especially if it be in the 
interest of a stronger neighbor to prevent their 
exercise) is in a position which seldom admits of 
a simple or harmonious solution. Ideally it has 

[44] 



a right to complete Independence : practically It 
has to be content with as much independence as it 
can make good; and the methods which it may- 
employ are various, always open to challenge and 
compassed by uncertainty. 

A nation may maintain its moral and spiritual, 
long after it has forfeited its material and politi- 
cal, independence. To such a nation the more 
valuable part of its independence has been pre- 
served. But it is hardly possible in the long run 
for a nation which has become materially and 
politically dependent upon another to retain its 
moral and spiritual independence unimpaired. 
The loss of the latter is the final stage in national 
decline. 

To the founders of Sinn Fein a national condi- 
tion was presented to which no other remedy than 
their own seemed to offer the prospect of relief. 
All previous efforts to recover the political inde- 
pendence lost by the Act of Union had ended in 
disaster and disappointment. Force had been 
tried and proved unavailing: the experiences of '48 
and '67 had left little doubt upon the minds of 
reasonable men that the attempt to regain Irish 
independence by force of arms was (however 
heroic) an impossible and foolish attempt. " We 
believe" (wrote the chief exponent of Sinn Fein) 
" with the editor of the Irish World that the four- 
and-a-quarter millions of unarmed people in Ire- 

[45] 



land would be no match in the field for the British 
Empire. If we did not beheve so, as firmly as we 
believe the eighty Irishmen in the British House 
of Commons are no match for the six hundred 
Britishers opposed to them, our proper residence 
would be a padded cell." But if force of arms 
had proved useless, so had constitutional agitation. 
There was no argument of public justice, public 
expediency or public generosity which had not been 
urged without effect upon Parliament. Irish 
members had been arguing against the Union for 
a hundred years: there was no point of view from 
which the case could be presented that had been 
overlooked. When Parliament seemed to listen 
and to be prepared to act it was found not to have 
heard the arguments for independence but argu- 
ments for a different kind of a Union. The be- 
lief that nothing was to be expected from Parlia- 
mentary action received later a striking confirma- 
tion: for when the Irish demand was whittled 
down to a bare minimum and all claim to inde- 
pendence expressly renounced, a pretext was found 
in the exigencies of English political relationships 
for refusing even that. 

Not only had political independence gone be- 
yond the chance of recovery by either force or 
argument but material independence had followed 
it. The trade, commerce and industries of Ire- 
land which had flourished during its brief period 

[46] 



of independence had dwindled since the Union and 
from causes for which the Union was directly re- 
sponsible. The " equitable proportion " of Im- 
perial taxation to which the taxes of Ireland had 
been restricted by the terms of the Act of Union 
had proved to be inequitable, so that Ireland was 
overtaxed to the extent of two-and-three-quarter 
millions of pounds per annum: new taxes in de- 
fiance of the Act had been imposed: Ireland, 
again in defiance of the Act, had! been made 
jointly responsible for a debt which was not her 
own : Irish banks and Irish railways were managed 
not with reference to Irish interests but in the in- 
terests of English finance and English trade: the 
Irish mercantile marine was no more: the mineral 
resources of the country in coal and iron remained 
undeveloped lest their development might act un- 
favorably upon vested interests in Great Britain. 
The population had declined at a rate without 
parallel in Europe: even Ulster, proclaimed to be 
prosperous because Protestant and Unionist, had 
seen the population of its most " loyal " counties 
almost halved in the space of seventy years. 
Nothing but the removal of the cause could arrest 
this spreading decay, and the cause was declared 
to be irremovable: to tamper with it was to lay 
an impious hand upon the Ark of a grim Cove- 
nant. 

But the last refuge of independence was still 

[47] 



safe — resolve was still strong — no weakness of 
acquiescence, no dimness of spirit, no decay of the 
soul was as yet to be discerned. An answer to 
these questions might be found in the history of 
the language and of what the possession of a 
native language implied. Up to the time of the 
Union the Gaelic language had preserved intact, 
in spite of Penal Laws and the instruments of re- 
pression, all that was most vital in the national 
spirit. Tales of warriors and heroes, of the long 
wars of the Gael with the stranger, the sighs of 
love and the aspirations of devotion, satire and 
encomium, all the literature and song of a people 
were enshrined in the native tongue. Behind it, 
as behind an unassailable rampart, the national 
culture was preserved, in misery and degradation, 
it is true, the mere shadow of what it was and 
might be, but still its existence was secure. The 
Irish language was understood all over Ireland, 
and was the familiar tongue of three-quarters of 
its inhabitants. It was not a necessary conse- 
quence of the Union itself that this should be 
destroyed, but it was a necessary consequence of 
the measures which the Act of Union made it 
possible to talce. The English Government de- 
cided to embark upon the task of " civilizing " the 
inhabitants of Ireland by a comprehensive system 
of practical education. In 1831 the " National " 
Education system was founded and before the 

[48] 



century was old Its work was done: it had " edu- 
cated " Ireland out of Its traditional civilization 
and culture. The authors and administrators of 
this system were sincere and well-intentioned men : 
they believed that they were removing a disability 
and conferring a benefit. They regarded ignor- 
ance as barbarous and disgraceful; and what was 
ignorance if It was not Inability to write, read, and 
speak the English tongue? A love of learning 
had always distinguished the Irish people; and 
here was the learning, for which so many vain 
sacrifices had been made in the past, brought in 
full measure to their very doors. Everything 
that might Induce suspicion of the Danai, dona 
ferentes, was carefully avoided. The Catholic 
Archbishop of Dublin held a seat on the Board 
and no book was sanctioned by the Board without 
his unreserved acquiescence. The CathoHc clergy 
were encouraged to take a share in the administra- 
tion of the schools and to supervise or impart 
the religious Instruction of the pupils. It was the 
avowed policy of the Board to avoid anything 
that might savor of proselytism on the one hand 
and of the perpetuation of sectarian discord on 
the other. Pupils of the two creeds were to meet 
together on equal terms and In friendly rivalry 
In the classroom, while their particular religious 
Interests were entrusted to their respective clergy. 
But this paternal care for the susceptibilities of 

[49] 



Irish children, this careful abhorrence of sectarian 
animosities, went hand in hand with an elaborate 
disregard of every distinctive national feeling and 
characteristic. English was the language of the 
school, while Irish was the language of the fireside 
and of the street. Irish history was ignored: 
references to national and patriotic sentiments 
were carefully excluded, as a possible disturbing 
influence, from the approved text books: while 
the privilege of being " British," and the duty of 
feeling it to be a privilege, were carefully incul- 
cated. 

It may seem extraordinary that such a system 
should have been accepted, even if the attempt to 
impose it were made. But in fact the bribe of 
knowledge is a great bribe; and in this case the 
consequence of taking it was in obscurity. 1 o 
learn English was to possess the only key to the 
knowledge that was offered, and when English was 
learnt, the language of " progress " crushed the 
language of tradition. A few far-seeing Irish- 
men, like Archbishop MacHale, saw the inevitable 
tendency and endeavored to correct it; but in gen- 
eral no one noticed that the Irish language was 
going until everyone noticed that it had gone. 
Men's minds were set upon other things. The 
struggle for political independence and political 
and social equality absorbed energy and attention, 
and the political struggle had to be carried on by 

[50] 



men who understood English. O'Connell's elec- 
tion for the county of Clare struck a deadly blow 
at the preservation of the language and at all that 
the preservation of the language implied: he him- 
self, with a miserable servility, refused to speak 
any tongue but the tongue of Parliament. The 
National Board of Education did not, it is true, 
escape criticism: but the criticism was directed 
not to its educational shortcomings or to its anti- 
national bias, but to its poHcy of " religious 
indifference." The Presbyterian ministers were 
up in arms against a system by which " the Gos- 
pel " was excluded from the schools. They 
claimed the right to conduct the schools sup- 
ported by the Board in defiance of the terms up- 
on which the Board had promised to support 
them. They contended for the principle of a 
program in which the reading of the Bible 
might at any moment without notice be substi- 
tuted by a Presbyterian teacher for any item on 
the program for the day, any Catholic chil- 
dren who happened to be in attendance being 
allowed to withdraw, the responsibility for the 
child's spiritual loss being solemnly laid upon 
the shoulders of the parents. The Protestant 
clergy, who were supposed as part of their duty 
to keep schools in their parishes, though they 
had neglected the duty for generations, followed 
with similar claims. They stirred up their con- 

[51] 



gregations until mobs took to wrecking the 
National Schools in countries like Antrim and 
Down, and rifle clubs were formed under the 
patronage of the local aristocracy for the de- 
fense of their threatened Bibles. Under the 
Ultramontane leadership of Cardinal Cullen the 
Catholic clergy adopted a similar attitude. 
They alleged that the National system was 
hostile to their faith. Whatever danger to the 
faith had been contained in it had at any rate 
escaped the vigilance of Archbishop Murray and 
the authorities whom he had consulted. But the 
spirit of religious animosity once let loose 
could not be chained; and the system which began 
by promoting the co-education of the two creeds, 
ended by a segregating of the population from in- 
fancy into hostile camps. This accomplished the 
end which was designed by nobody but reached 
by everybody, that of breaking down the feel- 
ing of national unity and perpetuating feelings 
which it had been the aim of patriots to oblit- 
erate. 

But though the closing decade of the nineteenth 
century presented a spectacle of national dis- 
union and apathy, of falling vigor and vanishing 
ideals, it saw the beginning of a movement des- 
tined to arrest the decline of one department of 
the national life. The foundation of the Gaelic 
League in 1893 ^^Y ^^ regarded as the turning 

[52] 



point in the history of the language. When it 
was on the verge of extinction its dedine was 
stayed by the enthusiastic patriotism of Dr. 
Douglas Hyde. Non-political and non-sectarian, 
the League worked for the restoration, preser- 
vation and diffusion of the Irish language, Irish 
music and Irish industries. In its councils 
Catholic priests and laymen worked side by side 
with Protestant laymen and ministers. It not 
only revived the language (its first and main 
object) but it proved incidentally, as if in answer 
to a frequent but foolish criticism, that Irish- 
men of different creeds and political opinions 
could sink their differences in the common 
interests of patriotism. It kept rigidly and 
sternly aloof from all connection with profes- 
sedly political parties. It had no more to do with 
official Nationalism than it had to do with Ulster 
Unionism. It resisted with success the attempts 
of some of the clergy to interfere with Its pro- 
gram: In the case of the parish priest of 
Portarllngton who objected to mixed classes on 
the specious ground of public morals it asserted 
its rights to control its own activities and estab- 
lished once for all, so far as It was concerned, 
the principle that the sphere of the clergy's activ- 
ities is not co-extensive with human life. It 
criticized the Hierarchy with as much independ- 
ence as it would have criticized a local Board of 

[53] 



Guardians; and in the end it won and held the 
enthusiastic support of the best elements in Irish 
life. Looking from things temporal and devot- 
ing itself to things of the mind, it widened the 
horizon and cleared the outlook of many districts 
through all Ireland. P. H. Pearse said with 
truth " The Gaelic League will be recognized in 
history as the most revolutionary influence that 
ever came into Ireland." The revolution which 
it wrought was moral, intellectual and spiritual 
and its influence in strengthening and developing 
the national character can hardly be over-esti- 
mated. Blamed alike for doing too much and 
for not doing enough, it adhered with undevi- 
ating consistency to its own program and has 
been fully justified by its work. It stimulated 
activities in spheres far remote from Its own. It 
enriched Anglo-Irish literature through the 
works of writers to whom it opened a new field 
and for whom it provided a fresh stimulus. 
There is hardly a writer in Ireland to-day of any 
promise in either prose or verse who does not 
owe a heavy debt to the work of the Gaelic 
League. 

The Gaelic League proceeded upon the 
assumption that Irishmen possessed and ought to 
possess an interest in the language of their own 
country. It did not argue the point or indulge 
in academic discussions upon the utlHty of Gaelic 

[54] 



as a medium of communication or upon the 
psychology of language. Its simple appeal to 
a natural human feeling found a response wider 
than could have been evoked by a learned con- 
troversy or effected as the fruit of a dialectical 
victory. But language is only a part of nation- 
ahty and the attachment of a human being to 
the language of his country is only a special case 
of his attachment to the nation. This, though 
the Gaelic League held aloof from all poUtics 
(in the narrow sense of the word), is what gave 
to the work of the Gaelic League a real political 
importance. The stimulation of national senti- 
ment in one department gave a stimulus to the 
same sentiment in other departments, and the 
new and vigorous national sense which it fostered 
was bound to lead sooner or later to expression 
in political action. But even after this political 
activity began to be manifest, the League con- 
fined itself to its original work, and held as much 
aloof from politics infused by its own spirit as 
from the forms of political action which held the 
field when its work began. 

Sinn Fein is an expression in political theory 
and actiorToTthe claim of Ireland to be a nation, 
with all the practical consequences which such a 
claim involves. It differs from previous national 
movements principally in the policy which it out- 
lines for the attainment of its ultimate end, the 

[55] 



independence of Ireland: though it should be 
understood that nearly every point in the Sinn 
Fein political program had been at least sug- 
gested by some previous Irish Nationalist thinker. 
In opposition to the Parliamentary Party it held 
that for Ireland to send representatives to West- 
minster was to acknowledge the validity of the 
Act of Union and virtually to deny the Irish claim 
to an independent legislature. In contrast with 
the National movements of '48 and '67 it dis- 
claimed the use of physical force for the attain- 
ment of its ends. While it held as a matter of 
abstract political ethics that a nation subjugated 
against its will by another nation is justified in 
regaining its independence, if it can do so, by 
any means at its disposal, including force, yet as 
a matter of practical Irish politics it renounced 
the use of force unequivocally. " It is because 
Ireland is to-day unable to overcome England on 
the battlefield we preach the Sinn Fein policy," 
wrote the principal exponent of the policy in 1906. 
The remnants of the Fenian Brotherhood had no 
sympathy with a policy such as this : and though 
•representatives of the " physical force party " 
were allowed to express their opinions in the Sinn 
Fein papers, their views were not officially adopted 
and never became part of the Sinn Fein policy. 
At least one prominent member of the old Fenian 
Partv saw reason to adopt the Sinn Fein policy 

[56] 



in preference to that of armed force. " I would 
not," wrote John Devoy from New York. In 191 1, 
" Incite the unorganized, undisciplined and un- 
armed people of Ireland to a hopeless military 
struggle with England." This renunciation of 
force was however very different from O'Con- 
nell's famous declaration of his Intention not to 
fight. While Sinn Fein held that the most prac- 
tical way to estabhsh Irish freedom in the twen- 
tieth century was not the way of force It never 
concealed its opinion that force was a legitimate 
method of securing national rights. In fact no 
responsible national leader has ever held any other 
opinion in any country. 

Nor was the Sinn Fein party in its inception a 
Republican Party. It was strictly constitutional, 
and in fact forfeited the support of many ardent 
Nationalists by adherence to this definitely con- 
stitutional policy. While the Parliamentary 
Party claimed to be the only constitutional party 
by its use of the forms of the existing constitution, 
Sinn Fein laid claim to the merit of a superior 
constitutionalism. It relied upon the Renuncia- 
tion Act of 1783 which declared that the right 
" claimed by the people of Ireland to be bound 
only by laws enacted by his Majesty and the Par- 
liament of that kingdom, in all cases whatever, 
and to have all actions and suits at law or In 
equity which may be instituted in that kingdom 

[57] 



decided in his Majesty's courts therein finally 
and without appeal from thence shall be and It is 
hereby declared to be established and ascertained 
forever and shall at no time hereafter be ques^ 
tloned or questionable." The Act of Union, car- 
ried as it was, was a clear breach of this declara- 
tion, and the poHcy of Sinn Fein was to ignore, 
holding it as null and void, the Union and every 
subsequent arrangement made in contravention of 
the Act of 1783. If It came to a question of con- 
stitutionalism Sinn Fein took up a High Tory 
attitude compared with the accommodating consti- 
tutionalism of the official Nationalist Party. 

Though Sinn Fein as a political organization in 
being did not exist till 1905' the way had been 
smoothed for it and several actual steps taken 
several years before. The first symptom of the 
coming movement was the establishment of liter- 
ary societies which drew their inspiration from 
the Young Ireland movement of the 'forties and 
the pubHcation in Belfast by Miss AHce MlUIgan 
of the Shan Van Focht, a literary and political 
journal which became a semi-official exponent of 
the new Irish-Ireland movement. The centenary 
celebration of the Rebellion of 1798 led to a 
quickening of interest in the history of Irish 
separatist movements and an endeavor was made 
to keep the interest from dying out by the estab- 
lishment of '98 Clubs. Finally in 1899 the 

[58] 



United Irishman was founded by Mr. Arthur 
Griffith. 

The title which Mr. Griffith chose for his paper 
is significant. The adoption of the name of John 
Mitchel's paper was more than a hint that John 
Mitchel's policy was to be revived. But it was to 
be the policy, not of the abortive revolution of 
'48, but that expressed earlier in a prescient pas- 
sage. A plan (said Mitchel) for the repeal of the 
Union " must develop not one sole plan followed 
out to the end, but three or four of the possible 
and probable series of events which may evidently 
lead to the result. It must show (for one way) 
how a parliamentary campaign, conducted hon- 
estly and boldly, might bring the state of public 
business in Parliament to such a position that re- 
peal would be the only solution; for another way, 
how systematic passive opposition to, and con- 
tempt of, law might be carried out through a thou- 
sand details, so as to virtually supersede English 
dominion here and to make the mere repealing 
statute an immaterial formality (this, I may ob- 
serve, is my way) ; and for a third way how, in 
the event of an European war, a strong national 
party in Ireland could grasp the occasion to do 
the work instantly. ... It should also show how 
and to what extent all these methods of operation 
might be combined." In this one passage 
Mitchel sketched successively the Parnell policy, 

[59] 



the Sinn Fein policy and the policy of the Eastern 
Rising. 

The United Irishman ran as a weekly paper 
from March 4, 1899, to April 14, 1906. During 
this time twenty-three issues were seized and con- 
fiscated in the Post Office and upon three occasions 
in the year 1900 the paper was publicly sup- 
pressed. In 1905 the Secret Service threatened 
the printer with prosecution unless the printing of 
the paper was discontinued; and in 1906 the in- 
creasing liabilities of the United Irishman Publish- 
ing Company (who engaged Mr. Griffith as 
editor) led to the discontinuance of the paper. 
But before it ceased publication the Sinn Fein 
Movement had been successfully inaugurated. 
The paper was remarkable for the ability with 
which it was edited, the literary excellence of its 
articles both editorial and contributed, the range 
of its topics and the freedom which it allowed to 
the discussion in its columns of different views. 
Its contributors included many of the best-known 
Irish writers, though many of them were not (or 
did not remain) in sympathy with its political 
propaganda. It championed the cause of the 
Gaelic League, of native industries, of native 
music and of native games. It spread informa- 
tion upon the mineral resources of Ireland, its 
waterways, its railways, its vital statistics, and 
the menace of emigration. It republished as 

[60] 



serials such standard works as John Mitchel's 
Apology and an authorized translation of 
D'Arbois de JubalnvUle's Irish Mythological 
Cycle. Mr. Best contributed a series of articles 
on '* The Old Irish Bardic Tales." It pubHshed 
a drama by W. B. Yeats and Its columns were 
always open to literary and dramatic criticisms 
and discussions. It had a weekly column on 
European politics. And finally It argued with 
courage, brilliancy and passion the cause of 
Irish Independence. 

The editorial in the first number gives a gen- 
eral idea both of the style and of the teaching of 
the paper. " There exists, has existed for cen- 
turies, and will continue to exist In Ireland, a con- 
viction hostile to the subjection, or dependence 
of the fortunes of this country to the necessities 
of any other; we intend to voice that conviction. 
We bear no ill will to any section of the Irish 
political body, whether its flag be green or orange, 
which holds that tortuous paths are the safest for 
Irishmen to tread; but, knowing we are governed 
by a nation which religiously adheres to ' The 
good old rule — the simple plan — that those may 
take who have the power, and those may keep 
who can,' we, with all respect for our friends 
who love the devious ways, are convinced that an 
occasional exhibition of the naked truth will not 
shock the modesty of Irishmen and that a return 

[6i] 



to the straight road will not lead us to political 
destruction. . . . To be perfectly plain, we believe 
that when Swift wrote to the whole people of Ire- 
land 170 years ago, that by the law of God, of 
Nature, and of nations they had a right to be as 
free a people as the people of England, he wrote 
commonsense; notwithstanding that in these latter 
days we have been diligently taught that by the 
law of God, of Nature, and of nations we are 
rightfully entitled to the establishment in Dublin 
of a legislative assembly with an expunging angel 
watching over its actions from the Viceregal 
Lodge. We do not deprecate the institution of 
any such body, but we do assert that the whole 
duty of an Irishman is not comprised In utilizing 
all the forces of his nature to procure Its Incep- 
tion. . . . With the present day Irish move- 
ments outside politics we are In more or less sym- 
pathy. The Financial Reformers . . . are Inci- 
dentally doing good In promoting an union of 
Irishmen In opposition to their one enemy; the 
resuscitation of our national language is a work 
in which every one of us should help; at the same 
time we would regret any Insistence on a knowl- 
edge of Gaelic as a test of patriotism. It Is 
scarcely necessary to say we are In full sympathy 
with the objects of the Amnesty Association; but 
we shall not at any time support an appeal to any 
such myths as English Justice or English 

[62] 



Mercy. . . . Lest there might be any doubt in any 
mind we will say that we accept the Nationalism 
of '98, '48, and '67 as the true Nationalism and 
Grattan's cry ' Live Ireland — Perish the Em- 
pire! ' as the watchword of patriotism." 

The political creed of the United Irishman was 
the absolute independence of Ireland; and though 
it did not advocate the methods of armed revolu- 
tion it opened its columns to those Nationalists 
who did: though its policy was the reestablish- 
ment of the Constitution of 1782, not the estab- 
lishment of an Irish Republic, it contained articles 
written by Republicans who made no secret of 
their views. But the object of this, confusing to 
the careless or intermittent reader, was gradually 
to build up a kind of national forum in which all 
" real " Nationalists might have their say, and 
to induce a general consensus of opinion in favor 
of the new policy. Its aim at first was strictly 
critical and educational. In writing of the '98 
Clubs the editor says: " We look to them for the 
fostering of a national and tolerant public opinion, 
which will raise the morale of the people, so griev- 
ously lowered by the squalid agitations of the past; 
we look to them for the inculcation of the doctrine 
of self-reliance, without which neither our land 
nor any other can hope for salvation; and we look 
to them anxiously for the teaching and training 
of youth, for our future depends largely on the 

[63] 



young." Everything was made to turn upon the 
question of self-rehance and independence : what 
inculcated or enhanced these qualities was good, 
what hindered them was bad or (at best) indif- 
ferent. Political independence was regarded as 
the sequel and corollary of moral independence, 
and all political action that sacrificed this stood 
self-condemned. Under this condemnation fell in 
the first place the Irish Parliamentary Party: their 
policy was derided as one of " half-bluster and 
half-whine " : when Mr. Redmond spoke, in an 
unguarded moment, of " wringing from whatever 
Government may be in power the full measure of 
a nation's rights " he was bluntly told that all this 
was " arrant humbug." " After one hundred 
years of the British Parliament we are poorer 
and fewer, and our taxation has been multiplied by 
ten. All the signs of the times point to the con- 
tinuance of this policy of practically burning the 
candle at both ends; and our self-respect and our 
status before the nations of Europe would be in- 
finitely raised by a manly refusal to lend the sup- 
port of our presence to an assembly in which our 
interests are Ignored whenever they clash, and 
sometimes when they do not clash, with the in- 
terests of England. If our ' Parliamentary repre- 
sentatives ' had spirit, they would have retired 
from the British Parliament when the Home Rule 
Bill was defeated, and have told their constituents 

[64] 



that they were wasting time in fighting Ireland's 
battle with British weapons and that further repre- 
sentation at Westminster was ' neither possible 
nor desirable.' That would have been a protest 
that would have aroused the attention of the 
civilized world and even now it would be well that 
such a protest should be made; for it is waste of 
time and money and a source of degradation to 
countenance a system which ignores us. . . . By 
turning their attention to the practical develop- 
ment of industries in Ireland and pledging them- 
selves to a policy of practical support and prefer- 
ence for the products of Irish labor, our people 
can undoubtedly advance the social condition and 
prosperity of the country; but while they are 
hoping against hope for some vague indefinite 
assistance from Westminster, a genuine manly 
effort in this direction is impossible." 

If the Parliamentary Party was charged with 
futihty and lack of dignity, other Irish movements 
were criticized with a similar candor. Even the 
Gaelic League did not win the entire and unquali- 
fied approval of the national Mentor. The " per- 
sistent laboring of the fact that the language ques- 
tion is non-pohtical " was held to savor of a certain 
lack of candor and of courage. The Gaelic move- 
ment (it was said) had for its aim " the intensi- 
fying of Irish sentiment, the preservation of Irish 
ideals " : it aroused enthusiasm " by awakening 



memories hot with hate and fierce with desire of 
vengeance on the foreigner." It was asserted 
that " as a factor towards freedom, and as such 
alone, the people will respond to its claims upon 
them: for them culture has no charms "; and the 
League was bluntly told that it could not continue 
to pursue its policy of aloofness. " With poli- 
tics," wrote William Rooney (who seems to have 
held a unique position of authority and trust in the 
new movement up to the time of his early death), 
" as at present understood, and which, after all, 
mean nothing but partisanship, the Gaelic League 
has rightly had nothing to do; but with politics, in 
the sense of some public policy aiming at the rein- 
carnation of an Irish nation, it cannot refuse to 
meddle." The GaeHc League, like the Parlia- 
mentary Party, pursued its way undisturbed : but 
the criticism was not unmarked. And the Catho- 
lic clergy (so often represented as immune from 
the criticism of all good Irish Nationalists) were 
faithfully (and not always tenderly) taken to 
task when they wandered from the straight path; 
it was said that they took no effective steps to 
arrest emigration: that they " next to the British 
Government " were " responsible for the depopu- 
lation of the country " : that they failed to en- 
courage Irish trade and manufactures: that the 
priests " made life dull and unendurable for the 
people " : that the Hierarchy had backed the Par- 

{SGI 



llamentary Party against the Nationalists of '48 
and '67: that they were apathetic on the question 
of the language. It was asserted that the priest- 
hood with their exaggerated caution with regard 
to the natural relations of the sexes had " brought 
a Calvinistic gloom and horror into Ireland." 
" To-day the land is dotted with religious edifices 
but the men and women whose money built them 
are fleeing to America to seek for bread." " It 
is high time this monstrous hypocrisy should be 
faced and fought. While the country is making 
a last fight for existence its people are being bled 
right and left to build all kinds of church edifices 
and endow all kinds of church institutions and their 
money is being sent abroad to England, Italy, and 
Germany. . . . We strongly advise the Irish 
people not to subscribe a single penny in future 
towards the eternal church building funds unless 
they first receive public assurances that their 
money will be expended in Ireland." These criti- 
cisms are characteristic of the candor and con- 
sistency with which the test was applied to all 
movements, bodies and institutions in Ireland: 
were they or were they not a factor in the material 
and moral upbuilding of the Irish nation as a free 
and self-reliant community? 

The war against the Transvaal Republics made 
the question of recruiting for the army a question 
of public importance in Ireland during the early 

[67] 



days of the paper, and its articles on the subject 
first brought it into conflict with the Castle 
authorities. That Mr. Chamberlain's policy was 
directed to the extinction of Transvaal indepen- 
dence was self-evident and the war on that account 
was not popular in Ireland. In the Boers strug- 
ghng hopelessly for the maintenance of their 
freedom was seen an analogue of the long Irish 
struggle for independence, and any Irishman who 
enlisted in the British army was denounced as " a 
traitor to his country and a felon in his soul." 
But it was not the crushing of Transvaal inde- 
pendence in which the army was employed that 
formed the only argument against enlisting. The 
official returns of the statistics of venereal disease 
in the British army were printed with a com- 
mentary of provoking frankness. The excesses 
of the British army in Burmah and the charges 
made against the soldiers for offenses against 
Burmese women were insisted upon to prove that 
no decent Irishman could join the army. But in 
fact it was something more than the sufferings of 
the Boers and the Burmese which inspired this 
attitude. The British army was regarded as the 
Instrument by which Ireland was held in subju- 
gation, as the force which upheld the power to 
whose interests Ireland was sacrificed. One of 
the concluding numbers of the paper printed the 

[68] 



text of an anti-recruiting pamphlet for the distri- 
bution of which prosecutions were instituted. It 
concluded: " Let England fight her own battles; 
we have done it long enough. Let her arm and 
drill the sickly population of her slums: the men 
of the hills and country places in Ireland will go 
no more. Let her fight for the extension of her 
Empire herself, for the men of the Gael are not 
going to be bribed into betraying themselves and 
their country again at the bidding of England." 
It was found difficult to obtain convictions against 
persons who distributed these pamphlets. Even 
in Belfast a jury refused to convict a man for this 
at the instance of the Crown: though the accused 
made no excuse or apology, and though his coun- 
sel said in his speech to the jury, " You are fathers 
and brothers, and there is not one of you who 
would not rather see your boys In hell than in the 
British Army." 

The seizure of the United Irishman by order of 
Lord Cadogan in consequence of its anti-recruit- 
ing propaganda served only to advertise its atti- 
tude, and secure for it some of the popularity 
which attends whatever is in conflict with the 
authorities in Ireland. It also urged the paper to 
further efforts in the same direction and from the 
time of Queen Victoria's visit in 1900, " who now 
in her dotage," as the leader on the subject ran, 

[69] 



" Is sent amongst us to seek recruits for her bat- 
tered army," it was in constant conflict with the 
Irish poHce. 

While the United Irishman pursued its exten- 
sive and boisterous business, of which this full 
account is significant and pertinent, an organiza- 
tion of Irishmen who shared its views generally 
was being slowly formed. In one of the early 
numbers of the paper a contributed article on " A 
National Organization " had appeared (and been 
approved of in a leader), urging the forma- 
tion of a party " with the openly avowed and ulti- 
mate object of ending British rule " in Ireland; 
such an organization should honestly acknowledge 
*' its present inability to lead Ireland to victory 
against the armed might of her enemy " and con- 
fine itself " for some time to the disciplining of the 
mind and the training of the forces of the nation, 
whilst Impressing on It that, In the last resort, 
nothing save the weapons of freemen can regain its 
Independence. ... It need have no secrecy 
about it whatsoever . . . such an organization 
should . . . require only two qualifications from 
its members, one, that they declare themselves 
advocates of an Irish Republic, the other, that 
they be persons of decent character. ... It 
should adopt no attitude of antagonism to the 
Parliamentarians; but point out to the people 
that Parliamentarianism Is not Nationalism, and 

[70] 



leave them, in their own judgment, to give it 
what support they pleased. Toleration, free 
impersonal criticism, and sympathy with every 
man seeking, after his own light, the welfare of 
our common country, should be distinguishing 
characteristics of the organization and its mem- 
bers." Discussion of these proposals, partly 
favorable, partly critical, followed and in October, 
1900, the first steps were taken in the foundation 
of the Cumann na nGaedhal. Its objects were 
to advance the cause of Ireland's national inde- 
pendence by ( I ) cultivating a fraternal spirit 
amongst Irishmen; (2) diffusing knowledge of 
Ireland's resources and supporting Irish indus- 
tries; (3) the study and teaching of Irish history, 
literature, language, music and art; (4) the 
assiduous cultivation and encouragement of Irish 
games, pastimes and characteristics; (5) the 
discountenancing of anything tending towards 
the anglicization of Ireland; (6) the physical and 
intellectual training of the young; (7) the de- 
velopment of an Irish foreign policy; (8) extend- 
ing to each other friendly advice and aid, socially 
and politically; (9) the nationalization of public 
boards. Membership was open to *' all persons 
of Irish birth or descent undertaking to obey its 
rules, carry out its constitution, and pledging 
themselves to aid to the best of their ability in 
restoring Ireland to her former position of 

[71] 



sovereign independence." The United Irishman 
commenting on this observes: " It comes to inter- 
fere with no policy before the people — it asks 
only the help and support of Irish National- 
ists. . . . Let us be Irish in act and speech, as we 
pretend to be in heart and spirit, and a few years 
will prove whether the remedy is not better 
sought at home among ourselves than beyond the 
waters." While the association aimed at the 
cultivation of a spirit of self-reliance and the 
attainment of a moral independence, it was clear 
that the realization of its ideals would be a slow 
process and would leave the actual political situ- 
ation much as it was. The whole Irish nation 
might talk Irish, play Irish games, support Irish 
industries, deanglicize their children, have their 
own ideas of foreign policy and love one another 
like brothers, and yet Ireland would not have 
regained independence. The ends of Cumann na 
nGaedhal were remote and, if it attained, unsatis- 
factory to those to whom independence meant 
more than a mere lofty disregard of the truth that 
Ireland was as a matter of fact politically depen- 
dent on another country. Something more was 
needed to bring the new policy (if it could be 
called new) into more intimate connection with 
political facts. The link with current politics was 
supplied by Mr. Griffith in an address which he 
gave to the third annual convention of Cumann 

[72] 



na nGaedhal in October, 1902, in which he out- 
lined what came to be known afterwards as the 
Hungarian Policy. The new policy, instead of 
adopting a neutral attitude towards existing polit- 
ical parties in Ireland, boldly declared war upon 
the Irish Parliamentary Party. The Convention 
passed the following resolution: "That we call 
upon our countrymen abroad to withhold all assis- 
tance from the promoters of a useless, degrading 
and demoralizing policy until such times as the 
members of the Irish Parliamentary Party sub- 
stitute for it the policy of the Hungarian Depu- 
ties of 1 861, and, refusing to attend the British 
Parliament or to recognize its right to legislate 
for Ireland, remain at home to help in promoting 
Ireland's interests and to aid in guarding its 
national rights." With this resolution Sinn Fein 
may be said to have been inaugurated. 

Though the policy of abstention from Parlia- 
ment came to be known as '* the Hungarian 
Policy " it was a policy that had been advocated, 
and to a certain extent practiced, in Ireland long 
before the Hungarian Deputies adopted it. In 
1844, the " Parliamentary Committee of the 
Loyal National Repeal Association on the At- 
tendance of Irish Members in Parhament " pre- 
sented a report which contained the following: 
" The people of Ireland having in vain attempted 
to obtain from the Imperial Parhament detailed 

[73] 



measures of justice, and with equal failure sought 
the restoration of their domestic Senate or even 
inquiry into the wisdom of that restoration, have 
at length sought to obtain those rights by agita- 
tion out of Parliament. They have to this end 
arrayed themselves into a Loyal and National 
Association to obtain the Repeal of the Union. 
They try to obtain strength by the reality and 
display of union and organization. They seek 
converts by their speeches, their writings, and 
their peaceful virtues. They are endeavoring to 
increase their knowledge and their power by read- 
ing, thinking and discussing. And to carry out 
their projects of organization, conversion and 
self-improvement, they subscribe large funds to 
a common treasury. Their efforts in the Imperial 
Parliament having then been so fruitless, and 
their undertaking at home being so vast, they, 
the people of Ireland, have consented that such 
of their members as seek with them domestic 
legislation, should secede from the Imperial 
Parliament and control the agitation, instruction 
and organization of the people at home." This 
report is signed by Thomas Davis. A corre. 
pondence between Thomas Davis and the Earl 
of Wicklow, to whom certain resolutions of the 
Repeal Association had been sent, debates the 
rival merits of the policies of parliamentarianism 
and abstention. The Earl, who had no intention 

[74] 



of leaving Parliament, wrote : " I 'now believe 
that there exists amongst the British people an 
anxious desire to do justice to our country and 
to atone in every way in their power for the evils 
of former mismanagement." Lord Wicklow 
had formed this conviction before 1844. The 
"Hungarian Policy" of 1902 was framed for 
the same situation and in face of the same 
conviction. 

It is difficult to understand why the credit of 
the policy was not claimed for Thomas Davis the 
Irishman instead of for the Hungarian Franz 
Deak: unless it be that the pohcy had in the case 
of Ireland never been put into actual effective 
practice and had remained fruitless of result, 
while in Hungary it had seemed to have achieved 
its object. Be that as it may, Mr. Arthur Grif- 
fith proceeded to contribute to the United Irish- 
man a series of articles on " The Resurrection 
of Hungary," reprinted in book form the same 
year and widely circulated. The preface repre- 
sented the policy as an alternative to that of 
armed resistance : the body of the book gave a 
h.Jtorical account of the struggle of the Hungar- 
ians under Deak for the restoration of the consti- 
tution of 1848 and its success, due (it was 
claimed) entirely to Deak's policy of abstention 
from the Austrian Imperial Parliament: the con- 
cluding chapter drew the parallel between Hun- 

[75] 



gary and Ireland, claiming that by abstaining from 
sending members to Westminster Ireland could 
secure the restoration of the constitution of 1782. 
The book was interesting and able : the narrative 
was presented with vigor and spirit: but the 
accuracy of some of its statements and conclusions 
was open to question and as a piece of popular 
propaganda it was a failure. While many people 
read it, it produced no immediate or widespread 
response. Exception was taken to the view that 
Ireland ought to aim at the restoration of the 
constitution of 1782: exception was taken to the 
substitution of a, peaceful for a forcible policy. 
" If the Irish members " (wrote a representative 
of the latter body of critics) " of the English 
Parliament withdrew from Westminster to- 
morrow the government of the country would 
be carried on as it is to-day; and so it will and 
must be as long as the people forget they are 
Irishmen with a country to free from a foreign 
yoke. The protest would end in smoke unless 
armed men were prepared to back it." 

Mr. Griffith, nothing daunted, continued his 
fight against on the one hand the traditional par- 
liamentarianism and on the other hand the advo- 
cates of physical force and revolution and the 
members of the Republican Party. His claim to 
independence for Ireland was to be based not up- 
on force but upon law and the constitution of 

[76] 



1782 : his claim was not a Republic but a national 
constitution under an Irish Crown. He tried to 
show in a series of articles on " The Working of 
the Policy" — which from now on begins to be 
referred to as the Sinn Fein Policy — how his 
ideas might be put Into practice. But to carry 
on such a policy as he had outlined, some political 
organization other than the Cumann na nGaedhal 
or the '98 Clubs was required. This was inaugu- 
rated at a meeting held in Dublin on November 
28th, 1905, under the chairmanship of Mr. 
Edward Martyn. The policy of the new body, 
the National Council, was defined as " National 
self-development through the recognition of the 
rights and duties of citizenship on the part of the 
individual and by the aid and support of all move- 
ments originating from within Ireland, instinct 
with national tradition and not looking outside 
Ireland for the accomplishment of their aims." 
A public meeting held afterwards in the Rotunda 
passed the following resolution: "That the 
people of Ireland are a free people and that no law 
made without their authority and consent is or can 
ever be binding on their conscience. That the 
General Council of County Councils presents the 
nucleus of a national authority, and we urge upon 
it to extend the scope of its deliberation and 
action : to take within its purview every question 
of national interest and to formulate lines of pro- 

[77] 



cedure for the nation," Mr. Griffith, who was 
the mainspring and driving force of the move- 
ment, speaking In favor of the resolution, pro- 
posed the formation of a council of 300 to sit in 
Dublin and form a de facta Irish Parliament, 
with whom might be associated all those members 
of parliament who refused to attend at West- 
minster; Its recommendations should be binding 
upon all County Councils and Boards of Guar- 
dians, whose duty it would be to carry them into 
effect as far as their powers extended. 

With this meeting ends the preliminary stage, 
and Sinn Fein formally takes Its place as a duly 
constituted political party with Its own policy and 
aims. The United Irishman, the organ of Its 
infancy, ceased to exist, and its place was taken 
by Sinn Fein. 



[78] 



THE EARLY YEARS OF SINN FEIN 

In the year 1906 Sinn Fein emerged from the 
region of ideals and abstractions, of academical 
discussion and preliminary propaganda, into the 
arena of Irish party politics with a fully formu- 
lated practical policy. Taking constitutional 
ground with the dictum that " the constitution of 
1782 is still the constitution of Ireland," it pro- 
posed to show how the people of Ireland, keeping 
within the letter of a law which they could not 
otherwise break, might render nugatory the effort 
to hold the country in dependence upon England 
in pursuance of the Act of Union. It proposed 
to arrest the anglicization of Ireland by recover- 
ing for the Irish people the management of those 
departments of public administration in which the 
anglicizing process was working most markedly to 
the detriment or Irish interests and which might 
be remodeled without any actual breach of the 
existing law. In the first place it seemed neces- 
sary to take education in hand, and by the intro- 
duction of a system more in accordance with Irish 
needs and capabilities and characteristics, en- 
deavor to train up a generation of young Irish 
men and women, imbued with a national spirit 

[79] 



and national pride, capable of taking their part 
in the agricultural, industrial and administrative 
life of the country. County Councils might do 
much in this direction through their intimate con- 
nection with the administration and policy of the 
Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruc- 
tion; a wise use of the means placed by the De- 
partment at their disposal might in a few years 
revolutionize to the advantage of Ireland the 
entire education of the country. The young men 
and women thus trained might form the nucleus 
of an Irish Civil Service, if the County Councils 
could be induced to abandon their " patronage " 
in the positions at their disposal and throw them 
open to competitive examination; others of these 
trained Irishmen might be employed in an 
unofficial Irish Consular Service to the great 
advantage of Irish commerce, handicapped in 
foreign markets by English councils in the in- 
terests of the English commercial houses. Pres- 
sure could be brought to bear upon the Irish banks 
to adopt a policy more In sympathy with Irish 
trade and industry. There was deposited In 
Irish banks a sum of £50,000,000, the savings of 
the people of Ireland; yet these banks invested 
this money in English securities (the Bank of Ire- 
land during the South African War even lent 
money to the English Government without in- 
terest) while Irish industries were starving for 

[80] 



lack of the capital which the banks refused to lend. 
The Stock Exchange, controlled by the Govern- 
ment, neglected to quote shares In Irish com- 
panies that might be formed for the furtherance 
of particular industries in particular districts, 
discouraging investors who were thus left unable 
to dispose of their shares In the ordinary way. 
It was hoped that public bodies as well as private 
persons could be induced to bring pressure to bear 
on the banks by withdrawing or withholding 
accounts until they should adopt a more patriotic 
policy, though it was more difficult to see how 
the Stock Exchange could be dealt with. The 
difficulties put by railways and their heavy 
freights on the exchange of commodities could be 
obviated by a development of the Irish waterways 
under the control of popularly elected bodies: the 
County Councils should see to this and to ques- 
tions such as afforestation and the encouragement 
of home manufactures by specifying their use In 
the giving of contracts for Institutions under their 
control. The Poor Law system should be re- 
modeled In accordance with Irish sentiment and 
the money expended upon it spent In Ireland 
upon Irish goods. To ensure the advantage of 
foreign markets without English Interference an 
Irish Mercantile Marine should be established, 
what could be done even by a poor country In 
this way being shown by the example of Norway, 

[8i] 



where nearly every one was at least part owner of 
a ship. 

But to stimulate and foster native industry and 
native manufacture was to Mr. Griffith (whose 
writings on economic matters formed a kind of 
gospel for Sinn Fein) an urgent and supreme duty. 
He was convinced that until Ireland became an 
industrial as well as an agricultural country her 
economic position was insecure. Thinking always 
in terms of national independence, which he inter- 
preted to mean national ability to dispense with 
outside assistance, he looked forward to a time 
when Ireland should be able not merely to feed 
her population from her own resources, but to 
supply them with nearly all the other necessaries 
of modern life. Irish coal and iron existed in 
abundance to supply the necessary fuel and raw 
material; there was plenty of native marble and 
other stones for building; Irish wool and hides 
were once famous over Europe for their abun- 
dance and excellence. All that was required to 
make Ireland once more a prosperous manufac- 
turing country was at her disposal within her own 
boundaries, and only waited for the policy that 
would call out her latent powers. In an independ- 
ent State the encouragement required would be 
forthcoming in protected legislation, pursued 
until the protected industry become established 
and able to compete on favorable terms with 

[82] 



similar industries in other countries, the work 
of protection being limited strictly to the task of 
building up a temporary screen to shelter a bud- 
ding national industry from the wind of competi- 
tion until its strength was established. The Irish 
Parhament in the days of its Independence had 
adopted this policy, which had enabled It during 
its short life to secure to Irish manufactures an un- 
precedented prosperity. But Ireland, deprived of 
legislative powers, might fall back upon a less 
secure but still efficacious method of protection. 
Irish consumers might refuse to purchase English 
goods while Irish goods of the same quality were 
to be had, and be content to pay in an enhanced 
price their share of what under other circum- 
stances the State might have expended in bounties 
to the industry; public bodies might insist upon 
the use of goods of Irish manufacture; port 
authorities should arrange port dues so that they 
should fall most heavily on manufactured goods 
brought into the country, and should publish 
periodical returns of the Imports of manufactured 
goods at every port in Ireland; Irish capital 
should be invited and encouraged to undertake 
the development of the country on Industrial and 
commercial lines, being assured, in the support 
of Industrial and corporate public feehng, of en- 
couragement and success In Its enterprise. 

In expounding this theory of protection and of 

[83] 



the vital necessity to a country of developing its 
industrial life Mr. Griffith was confessedly follow- 
ing the economic doctrines of the German 
economist Friedrich List, " the man whom Eng- 
land caused to be persecuted by the Government 
of his native country, and whom she hated and 
feared more than any man since Napoleon — the 
man who saved Germany from falling a prey to 
English economics, and whose brain conceived the 
great industrial and economic Germany of to- 
day." A man with credentials like these might 
well be listened to with profit. The commercial 
policy that made the New Germany could not fail 
to make a New Ireland, and List made seductive 
promises. He foretold an increase in population 
by a combination of agricultural and industrial 
enterprise greater in proportion than by the 
development of either industry or agriculture by 
itself: he denied the possibility of intellectual 
progress to a country relying solely or mainly 
upon agriculture : culture marched behind the mill 
and the factory. But the chief merit of the policy 
undoubtedly was that it promised a self-contained 
and independent economic existence, serving as 
the basis of a distinctive national culture. 

The merits of List's theories In the abstract it 
is for economists to determine : but the concrete 
instance of the commercial expansion of Germany 
seemed at the time a sufficient vindication of their 

[84] 



merit. But Germany was an independent State, 
competent to fix its own tariffs, give State encour- 
agement to its industries and determine its own 
destinies. Ireland could do none of these things : 
the efforts of individuals, societies and local bodies 
would have to supply the place of legislative 
control, their efforts must be voluntary and would 
be difficult to control and coordinate. To ensure 
the will to follow out the suggested policy if it 
were even accepted, and to secure its acceptance, 
was a work of argument and controversy, and to 
secure a sympathetic or even attentive audience 
was not easy. Great claims were made upon the 
national intelligence and the national conscience, 
and success could only be ensured by practical 
unanimity. Unanimity was not to be had, and 
could hardly be expected in the near future : the 
task of securing it was one to tax the resources of 
a generation of apostles, in the absence of some 
cataclysm which might involve a complete change 
in the general outlook and ensure the acceptance 
of the policy by the mere force of circumstances. 
Meanwhile something might be done to coordi- 
nate spasmodic and voluntary effort. In the ab- 
sence of a Parliament it might be possible to bring 
together a representative assembly whose direc- 
tions and decisions might carry a moral sanction to 
the conscience of an awakened public and to this 
end it was proposed to constitute a Council of 

[85] 



Three Hundred, forming a de facto Irish Parlia- 
ment. A similar council had been suggested by 
O'Connell, prolific of expedients : but, sterile in exe- 
cution, he had never permitted it to meet and 
transact business. The expedient was now to be 
revived: the Council was, upon report from special 
committees (such as those that had been appointed 
by the Repeal Association) " to deliberate and 
formulate workable schemes, which, once formu- 
lated, it would be the duty of all County and 
Urban Councils, Rural Councils, Poor Law 
Boards, and other bodies to give legal effect to so 
far as their powers permit, and where these legal 
powers fell short, to give it the moral force of 
law by instructing and inducing those whom they 
represent to honor and obey the recommendations 
of the Council of Three Hundred, individually 
and collectively." Finally, Arbitration Courts 
were to be instituted to supersede the ordinary 
courts of law in civil cases, which " would deprive 
the corrupt bar of Ireland of much of its incentive 
to corruption " and foster a spirit of brotherhood. 
Such was the new policy: and it was claimed 
that " not on recognition of usurped authority but 
on its denial — not on aid from our enemies but 
on action for ourselves, the Sinn Fein policy is 
based. Its essence is construction and its march 
to its ultimate political goal must be attended 
at every step by the material progress of the 

[86] 



nation." The work of exposition and instruction 
was carried on partly in the columns of Sinn Fein, 
partly by means of clubs and branches through the 
country. A branch was formed in Belfast in the 
early autumn of 1906, and at the meeting of the 
National Council a month later it was announced 
that there were already twenty branches in exist- 
ence. At that meeting resolutions were passed 
in favor of boycotting articles of common con- 
sumption from which the British Exchequer de- 
rives its chief revenue (a measure recommended 
long before by the Young Ireland Party), in 
favor of new systems of primary and secondary 
education, of competitive examinations for County 
Council appointments and of a National Banking 
System. 

The Appeal which the National Council issued 
for support was based on the ground that the 
Council " denies the right of any foreign legis- 
lature to make laws to bind the people of Ireland, 
denies the authority of any foreign administration 
to exist in Ireland, and denies the wisdom of 
countenancing the existence of an usurped author- 
ity in Irish affairs by participating in the proceed- 
ings of the British Parliament." 

The two years following 1906 saw a great 
advance in the spread of Sinn Fein principles. 
Debates were organized with members of the 
other Nationalist organizations, reading rooms 

[87] 



were established and lectures given. In Belfast, 
the Dungannon Club, a separatist organization 
which had for some time published a small and 
ably conducted paper called the Republic, as well 
as a series of pamphlets, now amalgamated with 
the West Belfast Branch of the National Council. 
Every care was taken to prevent the movement 
assuming a sectional as distinct from a national 
tendency. Every Instance of intolerance towards 
a fellow-Irishman committed by members of any 
political party was faithfully pilloried In the 
columns of Sinn Fein. When the Westport 
Guardians (for example) demanded the dismissal 
of Canon Hannay from his chaplaincy for being 
the author of The Seething Pot, which offended 
the political sensibilities of the worthy Guardians, 
he found no more strenuous advocate, and the 
Guardians no more unsparing critic, than Sinn 
Fein. In Dublin the movement was particularly 
strong, and even succeeded In securing the return 
of some of its candidates at the elections to the City 
Council. When the Liberal Government in 1906 
offered Mr. Redmond, In place of a Home Rule 
Bill, what was known as the Devolution Bill, the 
sincerity of English parties in their dealings with 
Ireland began to be widely questioned and Sinn 
Fein received an additional Impetus. An official 
Sinn Fein handbook, " Leabhar na hEIreann, 
the Irish Year Book, " was published containing, 

[88] 



in addition to articles on the Sinn Fein policy, a 
number of valuable statistics with reference to 
Irish resources, enterprises, movements and 
parties, both political and rehgious. At last In 
1908 the time seemed to have come for contesting 
a parliamentary election. Mr. C. J. Dolan, the 
sitting member for North Leitrim, declared 
himself a convert to the new movement. He re- 
signed his seat and offered himself for reelection 
as a Sinn Fein candidate. He polled less than a 
third of the votes, and Sinn Fein received a serious 
setback. In fact the ground had not been suffi- 
ciently prepared. A weekly paper, supplemented 
by a few pamphlets, with no great circulation out- 
side Dublin, was an insufficient instrument with 
which to achieve the success of a new policy within 
two years. It was proposed and attempted to re- 
pair the error by the establishment of a daily edi- 
tion of Sinn Fein. But the movement had made 
no progress among the more prosperous classes. 
The paper was in difficulties from the start and an 
attempt to make It more popular by increasing it 
from four pages to eight committed it beyond 
recall to failure. Meanwhile a Sinn Fein Co- 
operative Bank had been established, and, pushing 
ahead, the party issued a program to which 
candidates for election to all elected bodies in Ire- 
land were to be asked to subscribe. They were 
asked to pledge themselves to support the Inde- 
[89] 



pendence of Ireland, a system of protection for 
Irish Industries, the establishment of an Irish 
Consular Service and an Irish Mercantile Ma- 
rine, a general survey and development of the min- 
eral resources of Ireland, an Irish National Bank, 
National Stock Exchange and National Civil 
Service, National Courts of Arbitration, a 
National System of Insurance, National Control 
of Transit and Fisheries, a reform of the educa- 
tional system, the abolition of the poorhouses, the 
gradual introduction of the Irish language as 
the official language of public boards. In addition 
they were to agree to refuse to recognize the 
British Parliament, and to discourage the consump- 
tion of articles paying duty to the British Treasury 
and the enlistment of Irishmen in the British 
Army. 

The ambitious program met with little or 
no response, and with the collapse of the daily 
paper the apathy of the general public became 
more marked. On the mass of Unionist Ireland, 
especially in Ulster, Sinn Fein had practically no 
influence. The movement for the reform of the 
financial relations between England and Ireland 
which had followed the publication of the Report 
of the Financial Relations Committee in 1896 had 
been the last All-Ireland movement in which 
Unionist Ulster had taken part. But after a brief 
period of enthusiasm the movement had come to 

[90] 



nothing. Though the Report showed that Ire- 
land had been since the Union, and partly in con- 
travention of the express terms of that Act, the 
victim of grave financial injustice, being over-taxed 
to the amount of two-and-three-quarter millions of 
pounds per annum, nothing was done to remedy 
the grievance. The English Government was 
obdurate: the landlords gradually ceased to take 
any prominent part in the movement for fear of 
prejudicing their class interests. Unionist Ire- 
land, especially in Ulster, allowed its morbid 
suspicion of everything in which the rest of the 
country was interested to overbear (as usual) Its 
patriotism and its common sense, and Nationalist 
Ireland lost Interest In the matter In pursuit of 
other objects. The Financial Reform Association 
had been dissolved In 1899 and the country settled 
down again to the old political struggle. The 
Nationalist Party fought shy of the raising of all 
fundamental questions. Its policy was to " wrest 
from whatever Government was in power the full 
measure of a nation's rights," that is to say, to 
gain as full a measure of Home Rule from either 
Liberals or Conservatives as the exigencies of 
English politics and the opinion of the English 
pubHc might make possible. Their aim was not 
to educate Irish public opinion or to convince Irish 
opposition. It was taken for granted that the 
Liberal Party would some day bring in a Home 

[91] 



Rule Bill and carry it against the Conservative 
Party, and that that would end the matter: that 
the Conservatives (according to the English party 
system of government) would accept " the verdict 
of the people," yielding to the inevitable, and that 
the Irish Unionists would have to follow suit. To 
discuss the fundamentals of the problem, to en- 
deavor to unite Irishmen (so far as argument and 
a generally understood common interest could unite 
them) was tiresome, irrelevant and tending to the 
subversion of party discipline. For the policy 
now adopted by the Parliamentarians " a united 
party" was above all things essential; and the 
unity desired meant not merely a common aim but 
an agreement upon all details: the great offense 
was " faction," and under faction was comprised 
all independent criticism either of policy or of 
principle. A party thus constituted was, if things 
went well and it was wisely led, an invaluable 
instrument of parliamentary warfare at West- 
minster; but if things went wrong or a mistake 
was made, or if Westminster should cease at any 
time to be the center of interest, disaster was sure 
to follow. And this conception of the duty of an 
Irish National Party overlooked the possibilities 
latent in Ulster Unionism. To an extent, not at 
the time fully grasped by any one in Ireland, it 
stood not for the Unionist Party, as that party was 
understood in England, but for Itself alone. The 

[92] 



exigencies of party warfare required that it, like 
the Nationalist Party, should attach itself to an 
English party; that it should adopt the parlance 
of English parties; that it should declare its un- 
bending loyalty to Imperial interests and the 
British Constitution. But It was not inclined to 
admit in practice that the British Constitution 
could override its own particular Interests. It 
could not be ignored or flouted with impunity; 
It was the rock upon which all schemes based upon 
the peaceful possibilities of English parliamentary 
situations were destined in the end to make ship- 
wreck. 

But the rock was not yet in sight and its 
existence was unsuspected. It was common 
ground to the two Irish parties that the arena was 
Parliament and that the prize should go to the 
party which won the game according to West- 
minster rules. It is easy now for those who kept 
their eyes shut to say that they would have opened 
them if everybody else had not been born blind, 
and it would be more dignified to say nothing. 
But the fact remains that the mistake was made. 

During the lean years for its policy that fol- 
lowed 1908, Sinn Fein continued persistently to 
preach its doctrines : that to obtain " the full 
measure of a nation's rights " Ireland must rely 
not upon outside aid but upon her own efforts: 
that all Irishmen had a common interest, and that 

[93] 



interest not the interest of England: that all Irish- 
men, whether called Nationalist or Unionist, were 
brothers in a common country impoverished and 
weakened by the loss of independence resulting 
from the Act of Union, and that to recognize 
their common interests and understand one an- 
other was their immediate object. It published 
articles on the destruction of Irish industries in 
the interests of those of England, a destruction 
arrested by the Constitution of 1782, and acting 
without restraint since the loss of that Constitution 
by the Act of Union. It welcomed literary con- 
tributions by the most eminent Irishmen of let- 
ters, without distinction of politics or religion: it 
preached unceasingly the doctrines of toleration 
and goodwill amongst Irishmen. But as the pros- 
pect of the triumph of parliamentarianism through 
its alliance with the Liberal Party grew brighter, 
interest centered more and more upon the doings 
of Parliament and the vicissitudes of parliamen- 
ary fortunes. Now at last the dream of a century 
was to take shape in something resembling a sub- 
stance, and the time for discussion, arrangement 
and accommodation was over. In April, 19 10, 
Sinn Fein announced on behalf of its party that 
Mr. John Redmond, having now the chance of a 
lifetime to obtain Home Rule, will be given a 
free hand, without a word said to embarrass him. 
But it was difficult not to speak sometimes. When 

[94] 



the Liberal Budget left the House of Commons 
that month, before the veto of the House of Lords 
had been abolished, Mr. Redmond's aquiescence 
in these tactics was freely censured. When in the 
autumn of the same year Mr. Redmond com- 
mitted himself to the declaration: "We do not 
want to discontinue , our representation in the 
House of Commons when Home Rule comes; we 
desire to have Irish members sitting at West- 
minster not only to form a nucleus of the ultimate 
Federal Parliament of the Empire, but also to 
assist in legislation concerning Great Britain and 
Ireland collectively," the declaration was quoted 
with disgust. The Home Rule of the Liberal 
Party was indeed far removed from the Consti- 
tution of 1782. 

Sinn Fein took no official part in the elections 
of 19 10, preferring, as it said in its official organ, 
to remain " wholly free from any moral responsi- 
bility " for the legislation offered by the Liberals 
to the Parliamentary Party, while retaining the 
right to examine, criticize and warn. This was 
not purely an act of self-sacrifice. In fact Sinn 
Fein was never at so low an ebb. While the 
country was drifting farther and farther in the 
direction of Home Rule, Sinn Fein was insisting 
more and more upon first principles. Its official 
attitude of warm approval of the work of the 
Gaelic League was exchanged for one of insistence 

[95] 



upon the urgency of making Irish the national 
language. " We must begin again," said Sinn 
Fein, " to be an Irish-speaking people, or there 
can be no future of national independence before 
us." With England on the one hand and 
America on the other, 120,000,000 people speak- 
ing English, the danger to the language was im- 
minent. *' We freely admit," it proceeded, 
" that this conclusion is not one we sought nor one 
we desired. The conviction has forced itself upon 
us and has been with some reluctance accepted by 
us." And it continued to speak plain language 
about the Home Rule which now seemed Inevi- 
table : " No scheme which the English Parhament 
may pass In the near future will satisfy Sinn Fein 
— no legislature created in Ireland which is not 
supreme and absolute will offer a basis for conclud- 
ing a final settlement with the foreigners who 
usurp the government of this country. But any 
measure which gives genuine, if even partial, con- 
trol of their own affairs to Irishmen shall meet 
with no opposition from us and should meet with 
no opposition from any section of Irishmen." So 
far was Sinn Fein at this time from any desire to 
do more than infuse a new spirit Into Irishmen, 
favorable to the eventual future development of 
the policy outlined by the National Council, that 
it expressly disclaimed the title of a party. " It 
is not our business," was the conclusion of a pam- 

[96] 



phlet issued by the Belfast Branch of Sinn Fein, 
" to make one more party among the political 
parties of Ireland, nor to carry on a party propa- 
ganda nor to waste time quarreling with any politi- 
cal party. Above the cries of contending parties 
we raise the cry of Ireland and Irish independence 
— an independence in the gaining of which Catho- 
lic and Protestant will be shoulder comrades as 
they were a century ago, and in the advantages 
of which they will be equal sharers. Not an Ire- 
land for a class or a creed, but an Ireland for 
the Irish, and the whole of the Irish, not an Ire- 
land fettered and trammeled by England, but 
mistress of her own destinies, evolving her own 
national life and building for herself an ever-in- 
creasing prosperity. We can leave the past with 
its bitter memories, its bigotries and its feuds 
to those whose property it is, the reactionaries 
who here, as in every country, would stem the tide 
of national advancement. We have to recognize 
the nation, rather than parties within the nation; 
for it is greater than any party, and in the service 
of the nation all men have an equal right as well 
as an equal duty." 



[97] 



SINN FEIN AND THE REPUBLICANS 

From 1910 to 1913 the Sinn Fein movement was 
practically moribund. Political attention in Ire- 
land was largely centered on the fate of Home 
Rule and the tactics of the Irish Party at West- 
minster or the struggles of the party at home with 
Mr. William O'Brien and the All-for-Ireland 
League. The Constitution which Ireland might 
enjoy in 19 14 was of more pressing interest than 
the merits of the Constitution of 1782. 

But there were other forces at work in Ireland 
in opposition to the two official parties of Union- 
ists and Nationalists. There were in the first 
place the survivors of the Fenians, the Irish Re- 
publican Brotherhood, whose ideal was an Irish 
Republic, independent of any connection with Eng- 
land or indeed with any other country. Fenian- 
ism had become to all outward appearance practi- 
cally dead in Ireland. It had suffered, in the 
opinion of some at least of its members, from 
the fact that it had put revolutionary action first 
and the preaching of republicanism second. As 
one of them wrote afterwards, " The Fenian 
propagandist work in the sixties was entirely 
separatist with practically no reference to RepubH- 
canism. Rightly or wrongly I have always held 

[98] 



the view that the absence of the deeper Republi- 
can thought amongst our people accounted for a 
considerable amount of the falling away after 
'67." The people whose republican sentiments 
were weak " dropped back into the easier path 
leading only to a much modified national inde- 
pendence." Accordingly after 1867 the Fenians 
attempted to make republicanism an essential part 
of their propaganda. There had been a large 
number of Protestant Irishmen among the Fenians, 
and, as Republican sentiment had been traditional 
in Ulster since the days of the United Irishmen, it 
seemed that a movement aiming at an Irish Re- 
public might have more chance of success among 
Ulster Protestants than any form of " Home 
Rule." Besides, the " New Departure," the 
alliance of Fenianism with Parnell in the Land 
War, had weakened the movement still more. 
" It was disastrous," says the same authority, 
" to the Fenian movement as such, but it drove the 
Land League through to a degree that no really 
constitutional movement could even have reached." 
In allying itself to some extent with Parnell, in 
abandoning for the time in his interests its revolu- 
tionary propaganda, it seemed to have weakened 
Its own moral force, while it did not succeed in win- 
ning even Home Rule. And the fact of its being 
of necessity a secret society brought it under the 
ban of the Church. Fear of ecclesiastical censure 

[99] 



most often kept young Irishmen out of Fenlanism. 
It was not enough for the Fenians to say, as they 
did, that to the existence of a secret society whose 
aims were lawful there was no moral or theolog- 
ical objection. The experts in morals and 
theology said that there was, and their word, and 
not that of the Fenians, was accepted on the whole 
as final. And the actions of the Invincibles dur- 
ing the Parnellite struggle had gravely compro- 
mised not Parnell only but the Fenian Party, to 
which they were supposed to belong. As a matter 
of fact the Irish Republican Brotherhood had 
nothing to do with them. It had no sympathy 
with, nor reliance on, their policy of political 
assassination. A member of the Brotherhood 
who joined the Invincibles was regarded as having 
broken his oath to its members and its constitution. 
But this was not generally believed, any more 
than Parnell's statement that he had been no 
party to the brutal murder of Lord Frederick 
Cavendish; and the prestige of Fenianism was 
lowered. Still, the Irish Republican Brother- 
hood was in existence as a center of separatist 
and republican thought and the imminence of 
Home Rule could not but stimulate its interest. 
Its members must either decide to lend their sup- 
port to Mr. Redmond as it had once been lent to 
Parnell, or to come out, whether openly or in 
private, as his opponents. 

[lOO] 



The Irish RepubHcan Brotherhood was not the 
only center of repubUcan thought in Ireland. In 
1896 the Irish Sociahst Republican Party had been 
founded in Dublin by James Connolly, the ablest 
organizer and writer which Irish Labor has yet 
produced. Under his editorship The Workers' 
Republic became an organ of Socialism and 
Republicanism in their application to Irish condi- 
tions. The new party took its part in Irish 
political activities. It joined the movement to 
commemorate the Rebellion of 1798, the work of 
the United Irishmen whose political creed had been 
repubhcan. Along with other Irish Nationalists 
it joined in the work of the Irish Transvaal Com- 
mittee and helped to organize and equip the Irish 
Brigade which fought on the side of the South 
African Republics. But till after the General 
Election of 19 10 it made no attempt to enter Irish 
poHtics as an independent party. It remained in 
its constitution a purely trade union party though 
sympathetic with, and ready to lend its aid in, the 
Irish national movement. In 191 1 the proposal 
to found a combined political and industrial move- 
ment was defeated by only three votes at the 
Congress held at Galway, and in the following 
year the Clonmel Congress decided to found " an 
Irish Labor Party independent of all other parties 
in the country, in order that the organized workers 
might be able to enter the proposed Irish Parlia- 

[lOl] 



ment as an organized Labor Party upon the 
political field." Though the Irish Labor Party 
was not professedly republican, and though its 
political activities were confined for the time to the 
enforcement of the political interests of Irish 
Labor, yet the leaders and a considerable number 
of the rank and file were undoubtedly republican 
in their aims and sympathies. 

The Irish Labor Party had need, in truth, to 
be independent of all existing political parties in 
Ireland. The Ulster Unionist Party was defi- 
nitely and irrevocably committed to- the Conser- 
vative and capitaHst programme. It would as 
soon have admitted to its ranks a professed dyna- 
mitard as a professed socialist (whatever his views 
might have been on the subject of the Legislative 
Union). On Socialism the Church could not be 
expected to smile (and did not smile) and its atti- 
tude determined that of the Irish Parliamentary 
Party. The Party was in a delicate position: it 
could not say a word against Socialism for fear of 
offending the English Labor Party, whose votes 
were required in the parliamentary struggle : it 
could not say a word in favor of it for fear of of- 
fending the Church. It was sitting upon a razor's 
edge and a word too much in either direction might 
easily disturb its balance. So it voted steadily, 
manfully and silently for Labor measures in 
England and left its action to the country. In 
[102] 



the frame-work of the Sinn Fein program there 
was no place for Labor. Among all its plans for 
the relief of Ireland from the evils of the English 
connection there was none for the relief of the 
evils of which the workers complained. Its 
official organ was against strikes, and even con- 
sidered that the connection of Irish with English 
Labor was an act of treachery to the country. 
Some of the most pungent criticism to which the 
party was subjected came from the paper founded 
in 191 1 by James Larkin, The Irish Worker and 
People's Advocate. In its first number, the editor 
defined his attitude to the O'Brienites, the Irish 
Parliamentary Party and Sinn Fein. He de- 
scribed the last as a " party or rump which, while 
pretending to be Irish of the Irish, insults the na- 
tion by trying to foist on it not only imported 
economics based on false principles, but which 
had the temerity to advocate the introduction of 
foreign capitalists into this sorely exploited 
country." "Their chief appeal" (he goes on) 
*' to the foreign capitalists was that they (the 
imported capitaUsts) would have freedom to 
employ cheap Irish labor. . . . For eleven years 
these self-appointed prophets and seers have led 
their army up the hill and led them down again, 
and would continue to so lead them, if allowed, 
until the leader was appointed King of Ireland 
under the Constitution of 1782." 
[103] 



The definitely Republican movement found an 
organ of expression in the autumn of 19 lo by the 
establishment of Saoirseacht na h-Eireann, Irish 
Freedom, a fortnightly paper of eight pages, under 
the management of Seaghan MacDiarmada. Its 
motto was a quotation from Wolfe Tone: "To 
subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, 
to break the connection with England, the never- 
failing source of all our political evils and to assert 
the independence of my country — these were my 
objects." Its policy was explained at length in 
its editorial: "We believe that free pohtical in- 
stitutions are an absolute essential for the future 
security and development of the Irish people and, 
therefore, we seek to establish free political insti- 
tutions in this country; and in this we wish not 
to be the organ of any party, but the organ of 
an uncompromising Nationalism. We stand not 
for an Irish party but for National tradition — 
the tradition of Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, 
of John Mitchel and John O'Leary. Like them 
we believe in and would work for the indepen- 
dence of Ireland — and we use the term with no 
reservation stated or implied; we stand for the 
complete and total separation of Ireland from 
England and the establishment of an Irish 
Government, untrammeled and uncontrolled by 
any other Government in the world. Like them 
we stand for an Irish Republic — for, as 
[104] 



Thomas Devln Reilly said in 1848, 'Freedom 
can take but one shape amongst us — a Re- 
pubHc' " 

The attitude of this new republican movement 
to that of the previous Sinn Fein movement is 
clearly defined in a subsequent leader. " The 
temporary suspension of the Sinn Fein movement 
is often cited as the throwback but it is nothing 
of the kind. Under whatever name we propagate 
our ideas the Irish Nation must be built on Sinn 
Fein principles, or non-recognition of British 
authority, law, justice or legislature: that is our 
basis and the principles of the Sinn Fein policy 
are as sound to-day as ever they were. The 
movement is temporarily suspended because some 
of its leaders directed it into an '82 movement, 
thinking they could collar the middle-classes and 
drop the separatists; but when the separatists 
were dropped there was no movement left." 

The new movement was in fact an attempt to 
rehabilitate and reestablish the Sinn Fein move- 
ment by making it definitely republican while 
adhering to the main lines of the policy by which 
Sinn Fein hoped to succeed. But the original 
Sinn Fein continued on its way. Its paper con- 
tinued to be published and to find readers. It was 
unrepentant with regard to its political aims: 
" We do not care a fig for republicanism as re- 
publicanism," said Sinn Fein two years later; 
[105] 



Ijut from the winter of 19 lo dates the movement 
which eventually drove out of Sinn Fein the idea 
of the reestablishment of the King, Lords and 
Commons of Ireland under the Constitution of 
1782 and replaced it by that of an Irish Republic. 

The new movement was the direct outcome of 
the Wolfe Tone Clubs. It was they who carried 
out all the work entailed by the publication of 
Irish Freedom. These clubs had just been 
founded " to propagate the principles and dissemi- 
nate the teachings of Theobald Wolfe Tone and 
the other true Irishmen who in 1798, 1803, 1848 
and 1867 strove for the complete independence 
of Ireland; to encourage the union of Irishmen 
of all creeds and sections in working for the free- 
dom of their country; to promote the advance- 
ment of national thought and inculcate the spirit 
of self-sacrifice and self-reliance by which alone 
true liberty can be attained." The members 
pledged themselves to substitute the common 
name of Irishmen for that of Catholic or Protes- 
tant; no person serving in the armed forces of 
England was eligible for membership. 

This new branch of the Sinn Fein movement 
attempted to do what the old Sinn Fein had 
not as yet done, get into direct touch with 
labor questions and the labor movement, 
though perhaps not very successfully. The 
first number of Irish Freedom had an article 
[106] 



on sweated industries, pointing out that though 
Nationalists talked as if Belfast were the only 
place in Ireland where workers were underpaid, 
many Nationahsts were open to the same reproach. 
It pointed out the duty of the universities in the 
matter, pleading for a really scientific study of 
Irish economic problems, including (besides the 
wages system) such questions as the working of 
the Land Acts, Cooperation, the conditions of the 
Congested Districts. It welcomed with enthusi- 
asm the Cooperative Movement. " The co- 
operative spirit," it said, " is perhaps the greatest 
asset in modern Ireland and it will require a 
stronger flame than the speeches of political fire- 
brands to melt it away." On the occasion of 
the strikes in Belfast, Dublin, Cork and other 
towns in 191 1 it took sides with the strikers, 
in marked contrast to Mr. Griffith's Sinn Fein, 
which preached something approaching " abject 
surrender " on the part of the workers. It 
induced Mr. George Russell to contribute an 
article on the Cooperative Commonwealth. 
This undoubtedly went a certain way to bring 
about a friendlier feeling on the part of Labor 
towards Sinn Fein, but it was long hefore the 
attitude of strict Sinn Feiners was forgotten by 
the workers. Its attitude towards Ulster was 
more outspoken and definite. In 19 10 the objec- 
tion of Ulster to the approaching Home Rule 
[107] 



poHq;' of the Liberals began to harden into a threat 
of extreme militancy. A section of Ulster 
Unionists announced their intention not to submit 
under any circumstances to the Home Rule Bill 
even if it should become law and receive the Royal 
assent. To the Republicans this seemed " tanta- 
mount to an admission of the whole Irish case for 
self-government. If it means anything it means 
that Ireland, north as well as south of the Boyne, 
refuses to recognize any inherent right of the 
electors of Great Britain to decide how it shall be 
governed." The justness of this appreciation of 
the Ulster position must be examined later: but 
true or false, it is characteristic of the attitude 
which the whole Sinn Fein Party was afterwards 
to take. But the Ulstermen coupled with their 
attitude towards the Liberal Party and its doings 
a truculent defiance of all Catholic Ireland. The 
cause of this hostility the Republicans found in the 
attitude of the Parliamentary Party. While that 
party was in the height of its success " no attempt 
was made to understand their [i.e. the Ulster 
Protestants'] attitude or grapple with problems 
that appealed to them, and the economic griev- 
ances of Belfast workers were regarded as their 
own affair, not as the business of men who pro- 
fessed to represent the Irish people as a whole. 
The prevailing idea seemed to be that they should 
be left to stew in their own juice, and if they did 
[io8] 



not fall In with whatever scheme the Liberals 
carried through the English Parliament that they 
should be, In the phrase of a prominent par- 
liamentarian, which has never been forgotten, 
' overborne by the strong hand.' . . . The party 
of the future must make the conversion of 
Ulster the first plank In their platform and 
recognize that a national settlement from which 
Ulster dissented would not be worth winning." 
In the Ancient Order of Hibernians, all sections 
of Sinn Fein as well as the Labor Party saw a 
menace to any prospect of an accommodation with 
Ulster. This strictly sectarian society, as sec- 
tarian and often as violent In Its methods as 
the Orange Lodges, evoked their determined 
hostility. " This narrowing down," wrote Irish 
Freedom, " of Nationalism to the members of 
one creed Is the most fatal thing that has taken 
place in Irish politics since the days of the Pope's 
Brass Band. . . . That the driving power of the 
official Nationalists should be supphed by an 
organization of which no Protestant, however 
good a patriot, can be a member. Is In direct op- 
position to the policy and traditions of Irish Na- 
tlonahsm." The Ancient Order was described 
as " a job-getting and job-cornering organiza- 
tion," as " a silent practical riveting of sectari- 
anism on the nation." The Irish Worker was 
equally emphatic. " Were it not for the exist- 
[109] 



ence of the Board of Erin, the Orange Society 
would have long since ceased to exist. . . . To 
Brother* Devlin and not to Brother Carson is 
mainly due the progress of the Covenanter move- 
ment in Ulster." 

Devoted to the cause of an independent Irish 
Republic and of the union of Irishmen without 
distinction of creed under one national banner, the 
cause of Wolfe Tone, the movement attracted 
idealists who had so far held aloof from the older, 
non-republican, form of Sinn Fein. Chief among 
these were P. H. Pearse and Thomas Mac- 
Donagh, both poets and men of fine literary gifts, 
both regarded with affection for their high and 
disinterested devotion to the cause of Ireland. 
And in accordance with Irish Republican tradi- 
tion it took up an attitude with regard to armed 
revolution somewhat different from that of Sinn 
Fein. While the latter held that in the present 
state of Ireland an armed revolution was imprac- 
ticable, the Republicans, though not directly ad- 
vising it, held that it had a reasonable prospect 
of success if England should become involved in 
a European War. Some Irish revolutionists who 
had so far held aloof from all political parties 
were encouraged by this to join the republican 
branch of Sinn Fein and try to infuse into It a 
more determined revolutionary spirit. 

The Labor Party, whose opinions were ex- 
[no] 



pressed by The Irish Worker and People's Advo- 
cate, adopted a similar attitude. Their motto 
was the phrase of Fintan Lalor: " The principle 
I state and mean to stand upon is this — that the 
entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, 
up to the sun and down to the center, is vested in 
the people of Ireland." Their own language was 
equally explicit: " By Freedom we mean that we 
Irishmen in Ireland shall be free to govern this 
land called Ireland by Irish people in the interest 
of all the Irish people; that no other people or 
peoples, no matter what they call themselves, or 
from whence they come, now or in the future, 
have any claim to interfere with the common right 
of the common people of this land of Ireland to 
work out their own destiny. We owe no alle- 
giance to any other nation, nor the king, govern- 
ors or representatives of any other nation." In 
spite of the criticism that a purely Labor move- 
ment should confine itself to Labor questions, 
and leave the broader political issues to the one 
side. The Irish Worker declared for an independ- 
ent Irish Repubhc: "We know," it said, " that 
until the workers of Ireland obtain possession of 
the land of Ireland and make their own laws they 
can only hope for and obtain partial improvement 
of their conditions. We ask no more than our 
rights : we will be content with no less." The de- 
sire for a " free independent nation, enjoying a 

[III] 



true Republican freedom " linked the Labor 
Party to the republican branch of Sinn Fein, but 
on other questions there was much disagreement. 
The attitude of Arthur Griffith to the Wexford 
Strike in 191 1 was the subject of bitter comment. 
The Young Republicans, who objected to English 
Trade Unions sending " English money " to fi- 
nance the Irish strikers, were bluntly told to mind 
their own business: the Gaelic League, which en- 
couraged Irish manufactures, was said to have 
failed in its duty by taking no account of the con- 
ditions under which they were manufactured, nor 
of the wages paid to the workers who made them: 
" the revival of the Irish language is a desirable 
ambition and has our whole-hearted support; but 
the abolition of destitution, disease and the condi- 
t'ons that cause them are even more necessary and 
urgent. What is the use of bilingualism to a 
dead man? " 

But however they might differ on minor points, 
both of these new parties, the Independent Labor 
Party of Ireland and the Young Republican 
Party, were at one with each other and with Sinn 
Fein in opposition to the Parliamentary Party. 
It was pointed out that in the twenty-one years 
which had elapsed since the death of Parnell his 
policy of " blocking the way to English legislation 
until Ireland was accorded self-government " had 
been abandoned without any other definite policy 
[112] 



being substituted for it: that during ten of those 
years an English party, professing sympathy with 
Ireland, had been kept in office by the Irish vote: 
that Home Rule was still in the future and the 
principles governing the expected measure still 
undetermined. In March, 19 12, the Executive of 
Sinn Fein resolved unanimously: " That this Ex- 
ecutive earnestly hopes that the promised Home 
Rule Bill will be one that may be accepted as a 
genuine measure of reform by the people of Ire- 
land and that it may speedily become law. 
Should the Bill, on the contrary, be rejected as un- 
satisfactory by the people of Ireland, or should it, 
though satisfactory, fail to become law — which 
we would deplore — the organization is prepared 
to lead the country by other and effective methods 
to the attainment of self-government." In re- 
porting this resolution Sinn Fein wrote, in words 
which at the time seemed to many supporters of 
the Party offensive, but which now seem charged 
with portent: "No new parliamentarian move- 
ment will be permitted unopposed to build upon 
the ruins of that which goes down with a sham 
Home Rule measure. To make this clear before 
the Home Rule measure be introduced is the last 
service we can render the Parliamentary Party. 
They have had the Government ' in the hollow of 
their hands ' for years — they have removed the 
House of Lords from their path — there is noth- 
[113] 



ing to present the Liberal Government introduc- 
ing and passing a full measure of Home Rule save 
and except its enmity to Ireland. With a major- 
ity of over 100 and the Lords' veto removed the 
fullest measure of Home Rule can be passed in 
two years. It is the business of the Parliamen- 
tary Party to have it passed or to leave the stage 
to those who are in earnest." 

The appearance of the text of the Bill was not 
reassuring even to those advocates of Irish inde- 
pendence who were willing to take a measure of 
Home Rule as an installment. The financial pro- 
visions of the Bill met with severe and justified 
criticism. In spite of the fact that Ireland had 
been systematically over-taxed for a century, and 
that a Parliamentary Commission had so reported 
nearly twenty years earlier, the financial provision 
for the proposed Irish Parliament could only be 
described as beggarly. And almost everything 
that really mattered in the government of Ireland 
was withdrawn from the competence of the Irish 
Parliament. It was described in mockery as a 
" Gas and Water Bill," and even convinced sup- 
porters of the Parliamentary Party had their 
qualms in declaring their acceptance of the 
measure. There was no dubiety about the verdict 
of the Nationalist organizations opposed to Mr. 
Redmond. The Worker's Republic was out- 
spoken in the extreme: it complained that the 
[114] 



Bill had been extorted from the Liberals " by 
whining and apologizing " : in an Open Letter to 
the United Irish League of Great Britain, it said, 
" You are told that the people of Ireland accepted 
the Bill as a full and complete recognition of our 
claim as Irishmen. That is a lie ... a Bill, 
which is the rottenest bargain ever made by a vic- 
torious people with a mean, pettifogging, despised 
Government." " A beggar," it wrote again, 
" gets only crumbs and we, Irish workers, want 
a country." The verdict of Irish Freedom was 
equally emphatic; it was summed up in the 
phrase, "Damn your concessions; we want our 
country." 

But whatever individual Irish Members of Par- 
liament may have thought of the Bill, the Party 
was as a whole committed to it. No one in Ire- 
land knew what negotiations, barterings, and 
bargains preceded the actual drafting of the 
measure: what the difficulties and objections were 
which had to be met by Mr. Redmond: in how far 
he had offered concessions, in how far they had 
been forced upon him. They only knew that he 
was prepared to support the resulting Bill and that 
the resulting Bill was less than they had been led 
to expect. There was little open discussion of 
principles, criticism was not relished or welcomed. 
The Party had done its best for the country and 
the country was now called upon to back the 

[115] 



Party. A bargain had been made by the repre- 
sentatives of the Irish people and the Irish people 
were expected to stand by the consequences. 
Under other circumstances this appeal would have 
been accepted, but it was no answer to the com- 
plaint that the Irish representatives had not been 
empowered to abandon in express words every 
national claim that went beyond those satisfied by 
the provisions of the Home Rule Bill. This was 
the kernel of the dispute between the Party and 
the Nationalists who opposed them. It seemed 
as if by the deliberate renunciation of any desire 
or intention to claim for Ireland anything more 
than the status of a dependency of Great Britain, 
deprived forever (so far as an act of legislation 
could deprive her) of her immemorial claim to be 
an independent nation, the Party had betrayed the 
national demand and sold the national honor. 
But the Party did not see (or betrayed no sign of 
having seen) the relevance of the criticism; and 
certainly they miscalculated the strength of the 
opposition which was gathering in the country. 
In the face of Ulster's attitude, they confidently 
expected the whole country to rally to their sup- 
port. And, after all, what could, or would, the 
dissentients do about it? Sinn Fein continued 
loudly to proclaim its policy of opposition to the 
use of force. It was all very well to say " Sinn 
Fein is the policy of to-morrow. If Ireland be 
[ii6] 



again deceived as to Home Rule, she has no other 
policy to fall back upon"; but the same article 
(December, 191 2) contained the words: "The 
great offense of Sinn Fein Indeed In the eyes of Its 
opponents Is that It does not urge an untrained and 
unequipped country to futile Insurrection." If 
Sinn Fein then would only talk, and the only place 
to talk to the purpose was the House of Commons, 
what was there to prevent Home Rule from being 
an accomplished fact " In the not far distant 
future"? Ulster supplied the answer, not for 
itself only, but for the rest of Ireland. 



["?] 



THE VOLUNTEER MOVEMENT 

The genius of Ulster (perhaps through some 
happy combination of primitive stocks) has always 
been practical and militant. It was the last Irish 
province to submit to English rule. The Celtic 
population which survived the clearances and the 
plantings has exercised upon planters and settlers 
the ancient charm of the Celtic stock and made 
them, in spite of themselves, ipsis Hihernis 
Hiberniores. The O'Neills were the most for- 
midable antagonists whom the invaders encoun- 
tered in Ireland. They made the last great stand 
for national independence. When Owen Roe 
O'Neill died the Irish nation was, in the words of 
Davis, " sheep without a shepherd when the snow 
shuts out the sky " and the flight of the Earls was 
the sign that the resistance of Ireland was over 
with the resistance of Ulster. In later times and 
under changed conditions Ulster retained the pre- 
rogative of leadership. The Volunteers who 
forced the Constitution of 1782 were largely 
Ulstermen; the leaders of the United Irishmen 
were to be found in Ulster and the compact of 
their Union was sealed on the mountain that rises 
above Belfast. John Mitchel, who led the Young 
[118] 



Irelanders in action as Davis was their master in 
thought, was the son of an Ulster Presbyterian 
minister. Other Irishmen may have excelled in 
literature and the arts, have voiced more elo- 
quently the aspirations of their country or sung 
with more pathos of its fall, but the bent of Ulster 
has been on the whole towards action and move- 
ment. The heart and brain of Ireland may beat 
and think elsewhere, but Ulster is its right arm. 
Ireland is proud of Ulster. Under an unnatural 
and vicious system of government they have quar- 
reled; but if Ulster were reconciled to Ireland 
Ulster might lead it where it chose. 

On the question of the Home Rule Bill Ulster 
was almost equally divided. The majority of the 
Ulster Protestants were against it, though a 
minority, among whom traditions of Protestant 
Nationalism had survived the sordid bigotries 
fostered for a century, were strongly in its favor; 
the majority of the Catholic population were in 
favor of it. Among the Nationalists there was a 
minority who professed the creed of Sinn Fein and 
of Republicanism: late in 19 13 a branch of the 
Young Republican Party in Belfast, composed of 
Gaelic Leaguers, members of Freedom Clubs and 
Trades Unionists unfurled its banner of an orange 
sunburst on a green ground with the motto in 
white, "Young Republican Party — Dia agus 
an Pobul," and there had been branches of Sinn 

[119] 



Fein established In Ulster some years earlier; 
but on the whole the Ulster Nationalists supported 
the Parliamentary Party. No geographical or 
ethnological line of political demarcation could be 
drawn. There was no district in Ulster which 
was not politically divided: there was no stock In 
Ulster which had not members in both political 
camps. Some of the most outspoken and vehe- 
ment of the Unionist Party bore, and were proud 
of, purely Irish names; many of the Nationalists 
were the bearers of names introduced Into Ireland 
with the planters sent by King James. The settled 
policy of the Act of the Union had done its work 
with almost complete success. The Protestant 
had learned to regard the connection with England 
as essential to the maintenance of his religious and 
civil freedom : he believed not only that the Roman 
Catholic Church was officially intolerant, but that 
all Roman Catholics were, as a matter of 
fact, intolerant In conduct and In practice, and 
Incapable of being anything else. And Irish 
Catholics seemed to him to be peculiarly sus- 
ceptible to the intolerant influences of their 
ecclesiastical leaders. When the views of the 
Catholic Hierarchy in Ireland and those of Irish 
Nationalists coincided he saw in their agree- 
ment the triumph of the "priest in politics": 
when they differed he was either at a loss to 
account for an occurrence so far removed from the 
[120] 



settled habits of nature or saw In it an obscure 
but interesting symptom of a fear of Home Rule 
on the part of the Hierarchy, a fear that Home 
Rule might jeopardize their own predominance. 
But not even the supposed hesitations of the 
Hierarchy could reconcile him to the prospect of 
a Home Rule under which the electoral majority 
would be " priest-ridden." Unkind critics might 
have urged that people whose whole political out- 
look was hag-ridden by the phantoms of popes and 
priests were not in a position to call those " priest- 
ridden " who at any rate sometimes differed 
sharply from their clergy in political and civil af- 
fairs; but the Ulster Protestant was proof against 
mere logical quibbles and rhetorical retorts. 
He had done his thinking about politics with the 
Act of Union : he had taken his stand : he was care- 
less of taunts, cajolery and threats: let those med- 
dle with him who dared. He spurned the allega- 
tion of intolerance, but he was intolerant without 
knowing it and (to do him justice) for reasons 
which, had they corresponded with the facts, 
would have been sound. An Ireland under 
ecclesiastical despotism, whether Protestant or 
Catholic, would be no place for a man to live in, 
and to exchange the Legislative Union with Eng- 
land for a legislative union with Rome would in- 
deed be a disastrous bargain. As a matter of fact, 
had the Ulster Protestant reahzed it, there was no 

[121] 



fear of any such result. In the Irish Catholic 
mind there was clearly defined the limit of the 
sphere in which the Church was supreme. That 
sphere was much larger than the restricted area 
within which the Protestant allowed his Church to 
legislate at its ease: but it was subject to limita- 
tions all the same. And it was growing narrower 
and narrower. Individual ecclesiastics may have 
roamed at large (and did roam at large) over 
the whole sphere of human activities : individual 
priests made monstrous claims upon the submission 
of their flocks in matters with which they had no 
kind of concern. The intense devotion to their 
religion which marks Catholic Irishmen, the re- 
spect which they feel for the priesthood which 
stood by them in dark and evil days, had induced 
a spirit of patience in submission to claims which 
could not be substantiated. But with the revival 
of interest in political thought the position was 
changing. The battle for political freedom of 
thought and action which the Fenians had fought 
had borne fruit. Ecclesiastical claims in civil mat- 
ters were subject to a close scrutiny. The Gaelic 
League had more than once asserted with success 
its claim to be free in its own sphere from any kind 
of ecclesiastical dictation, and in every instance 
the people of Ireland has taken its side. The at- 
tempt to the Roman Curia to interfere with the 
subscription to the Parnell testimonial had been an 
[122] 



ignominious failure; and the boast of an Irish 
leader that he would as soon take his politics from 
Constantinople as from Rome was generally ac- 
knowledged to be sound as a statement of theory. 
But there were still instances enough of impossible 
claims on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities 
to afford the Ulster Protestant a good prima facie 
brief against Home Rule. 

Allied to the fear of the " priest in politics " 
was the fear that under Home Rule every position 
in Ireland worth speaking of would be given to 
Roman Catholics and that Protestants would be 
systematically and ruthlessly excluded. This was 
an apprehension very difficult to deal with because 
the real grounds of it were seldom openly 
expressed. These grounds were first, the con- 
sciousness that Irish Catholics had been for 
generations systematically excluded from all posts 
that were in the gift of Irish Protestants and the 
consequent probabihty that reprisals would be 
called for and taken; second, the innate conviction, 
born of generations of religious controversy and 
suspicion, that Catholics were " not to be trusted," 
that whatever they said to the contrary, they were 
certain to act harshly towards Protestants, and 
that the accession to power in Ireland of a perma- 
nent Catholic majority would mean persecution in 
matters of religion and corruption in matters of 
administration. This position was fortified by a 
[123] 



set of arguments, crude in themselves, but less 
crude than the convictions that required to employ 
them. It was pointed out that Irish Catholics, 
being deprived for generations of acceptable 
opportunities of higher education, and of practi- 
cally all opportunities of administrative experi- 
ence, could not be expected to have the necessary 
qualifications for the posts to which they were 
certain to be appointed: that this was not their 
fault (it certainly was not) but that, facts being 
facts, reasonable persons must take account of 
them and frame their attitude in accordance with 
them. It may seem strange that all this was 
called " adherence to the principles of civil and 
religious liberty," that persons calling for re- 
ligious toleration in the abstract should refuse to 
practice it in any number of given cases: but 
though there was a certain amount of conscious 
artifice in the use of words, arising from a dim 
feeling that the profession of tolerant and liberal 
sentiments was more likely to arouse outside 
sympathy than a blunt statement of rehgious 
prejudice, there was, after all, the idea that 
the only way to preserve civil and religious liberty 
in Ireland for anybody was to curtail its exercise 
in practice by the Roman Catholic and Na- 
tionalist portion of the country. It was easy 
for Catholics to point to the number of Protestants 
[124] 



who had been honored and trusted leaders 
of the national movement, to the friendly terms 
upon which Protestants and Catholics for the 
most part lived together in the South and West 
of Ireland, to the Protestants who had been ap- 
pointed to positions of trust and profit under 
boards and in institutions managed by Irish 
Catholics. The answer was that such Protestants 
either were the only persons who could be trusted 
to perform the duties of their position or had 
proved " accommodating " enough to suit, or that 
their appointment was a part of a deep-laid plan to 
conceal the real feeling of Catholics to Protestants 
until such time as, the bait being taken, Protestants 
would confide in their enemies and hand themselves 
over to their mercies. 

It is evident that no line of argument would 
have dispelled feelings such as these; and there 
does not seem to be in fact any possibility of dis- 
pelling them by mere professions of friendliness, 
or by any other means than an experience to the 
contrary which can build up gradually an opposite 
conviction. 

The religious difficulty was the root difficulty 
in Ulster with regard to Home Rule. If it had 
been removed or removable the rest would have 
been easy; but it was not the only difficulty. 
There was the fear, widely held by the Belfast 
merchants and manufacturers, that a Home Rule 

[125] 



Parliament would ruin their industries: directly 
by means of taxation and indirectly by public 
mismanagement. It was held that an Irish Par- 
liament could not " pay its way " without the 
imposition of extra taxation, and that no source 
of profitable taxation was to be found in Ireland 
save and except the prosperous industries of the 
North. In the second place, it was believed that, 
Ireland being largely agricultural, the new Parlia- 
ment would represent a predominantly agricultural 
interest and that its legislation might be expected 
to fail to take into account the industrial interests 
of the country, mainly represented in the North. 
Again, an untried Parliament would for a time be 
almost certainly guilty of mismanagement and 
incapacity from which the business interests of the 
North would be sure to suffer. 

Lastly, the strong " British " sentiment of 
Ulster barred the way to any weakening of the tie 
uniting Ireland to Great Britain. This feeling, 
amounting at times almost to the consciousness of 
a secondary nationality, found expression in the 
theory that Protestant Ulster was a separate 
" nation." But though the expression of the 
theory was often absurd, the feeling which 
underlay it was genuine. It had not been always 
there : it was liable to disappear under the stress 
of stronger feelings: it had been subject to revul- 
sions. When the Irish Church Act was passed, 
[126] 



the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, the Car- 
dinalate of Ulster Protestantism, had passed by a 
majority the following resolution: "That all 
statements and provisions in the objects, rules and 
formularies of the Orange institution which im- 
pose any obligation on Its members to maintain 
the legislative Union between Great Britain and 
Ireland be expunged therefrom." The reso- 
lution was unoperative because a two-thirds 
majority was required to alter the rules: but that 
it could be passed is significant of the fact that 
" British " sentiment is not the ruling sentiment 
in the stronghold of Ulster Unionism under provo- 
cation. Still, though spasmodic and uncertain, 
the feeling had to be taken into account, and in 
the hands of skillful manipulators was capable 
of being worked Into a factitious fervor. 

While Ulster Unionists were of this mind it 
was not to be expected that they would acquiesce 
without protest In the passing of a Home Rule 
Act: nor was It to be expected that they would 
think differently because a majority of the electors 
of Great Britain decided that they should. The 
only people who could win them were their own 
countrymen. Sinn Fein saw this clearly and In 
its own way tried Its best to allay Protestant fears 
and Protestant prejudices. Irish Freedom printed 
a letter from New York from an old Fenian who 
said, " The great barrier to Irish success Is the 
[127] 



fear of the Protestants — unfounded and unrea- 
sonable, but undeniably there — that their inter- 
ests would be in danger in a free Ireland. Re- 
move that fear and the Irish question is solved. 
It would be of infinitely more service to Ireland 
to convert ten Ulster Orangemen to Nationality 
by convincing them that their interests would be 
safe in a free Ireland than to convince a million 
Englishmen that the Irish would be loyal to the 
king. . . . We had many ex-Orangemen in 
Fenianism. . . . All experience shows that it 
is easier to convert an Orangeman to full 
nationality than to any form of Home Rule." 
But for Irish Catholics to convert Irish Orange- 
men to anything requires infinite tact, infinite 
patience, and a long lapse of time: and it can- 
not be said that either the Sinn Fein or the 
Republican Party properly estimated the difH- 
culty and complexity of the problem. The 
attempt to moderate the Ulster resistance by 
appeals to the principles of democratic govern- 
ment was, if possible, even less successful. It 
proved vain to urge that under democratic rule 
the will of the majority must prevail: that 
every party must expect to be in its turn in a mi- 
nority and must learn to take the rough with the 
smooth: that the very principle and object of 
the Act of Union was that people in Ireland 
should not have the final say in the Govern- 
[128] 



ment of Ireland but that the Parliament of the 
United Kingdom should decide: that both parties 
in Ireland had acknowledged this principle for 
generations and that for the Nationalists to act as 
the Unionists were doing now would have been 
denounced by the Unionists themselves as' an 
offense against good government. Appeal was 
made to Ulster in the interests of the Empire to 
allow Home Rule to have at least a fair trial. It 
was told that Englishmen were convinced that the 
government of Ireland was radically vicious, and 
that the only way to amend it was to entrust the 
internal affairs of Ireland to a strictly subordinate 
Parliament: that they felt that to continue in Ire- 
land indefinitely an indefensible system of 
administration was to embitter the internal rela- 
tions of the three kingdoms and weaken the 
Empire at the very center. It was pointed out 
that a friendly Ireland would be worth many 
divisions of the Fleet and Army in the European 
struggle which could be seen to be approaching 
and the Ulster Unionists were asked to *' sacri- 
fice " to the Empire what Parliament felt they 
ought no longer to retain. 

Neither argument nor appeal had the least 
effect : the argument meant nothing to them and 
the appeal was supposed to Imply that the argu- 
ment was known to be unsound. They took their 
stand upon the Act of Union and declared that, It 
[129] 



having once been passed, no Parliament had any 
right whatever to deprive the Unionists of Ulster 
of " their rights as British citizens." It was, 
of course, perfectly clear that, Home Rule or no 
Home Rule, everybody in the country was as much 
a British citizen as ever: and the idea that Parlia- 
ment could not, if it pleased, repeal the Act of 
Union (which, as a matter of fact, it was very far 
indeed from proposing to do) was quite absurd. 
The fact is that all parties were at cross purposes 
and that a great many politicians were using 
language which meant one thing to themselves 
and another thing to everybody else, while a 
certain number were using language which they 
were perfectly well aware did not express what 
they really meant. " Loyalty to the Empire " 
did not mean the same thing to the Prime Minister 
and to the Orange orators who held the ear of 
Ulster; and when the latter professed sentiments 
of toleration and good will to " their Catholic 
fellow-countrymen " (as they sometimes did) they 
must have known that they were using words which 
they did not mean literally and strictly. At the 
bottom of everything was the conviction that. Pro- 
testantism being a superior kind of religion, any 
measure which placed Protestants on a footing of 
permanent equality with Roman Catholics, a posi- 
tion in which Protestants would (to use a common 
phrase) "pull only their own weight," was an 

[130] 



offense against first principles, a measure to be 
resisted to the utmost, first by any arguments 
which came to hand, and in the last resort by other 
measures. They were " loyal to the Empire " but 
they expected loyalty from the Empire to them: 
placed in Ireland in a position of superiority 
guaranteed by the Union, they had seen the 
symbols of superiority one by one stripped from 
their shoulders. A long series of " concessions " 
to the Catholics (as successive steps in the estab- 
lishment of religious equality were described) had, 
it was said, left " the Irish " without any " real 
grievance." The Irish were free to vote, to buy 
and sell, to build their churches, to have their own 
schools (which the State paid for), to exercise, in 
short, all civil rights, with the one restriction, 
that in the Parliament which legislated for their 
country they were in a permanent minority. 
This was the one great result, as it had been the 
one chief attraction, of the Union, and this it was 
determined at all hazards to retain. 

Everybody at the time underestimated the ex- 
tent and the vigor of this feeling, except those 
who shared it. Englishmen thought (when they 
heard of it) that it was all talk and that a " more 
reasonable view would eventually prevail " : they 
never understood that they had rivetted upon Ire- 
land a system which prevented its upholders from 
taking a *' reasonable " view of anything and inca- 

[131] 



pacitated them from understanding any point of 
view except their own. Irish Nationalists pointed 
to the long series of truculent threats with which 
Orange Ulster had greeted every measure of Irish 
reform. They recalled the " gun clubs " which 
had been the answer to the establishment of the 
Board of National Education: the threat to " kick 
the Queen's crown into the Boyne " if the Irish 
Church Act should be passed; and they confidently 
expected to see a similar luxuriance of denuncia- 
tion wither before the chilling blast of an Act of 
Parliament. Sinn Fein and the Republican Party 
(though they did not grasp the fact that what the 
Orange Party feared was not the suppression of 
their religion but the loss of its political 
ascendancy) adopted an attitude useless to recon- 
cile Ulster to Home Rule but admirably calcu- 
lated, once Home Rule were passed in defiance of 
Ulster, to work upon its feeling of resentment at 
the " betrayal " of its interests and exploit its 
wounded pride in the interests of the independence 
of Ireland. 

But while Sinn Fein was making its proposals, 
unheeded (and indeed unheard) by those to whom 
they were addressed, to disarm the opposition of 
Ulster to the cause of Irish freedom, the Ulster 
leaders were taking steps to adopt a policy sup- 
posed to have been abandoned in Irish politics 
since the failure of the Fenian rising. The staid 
[132] 



merchants, the prosperous professional classes, 
the sturdy farmers of Ulster, supported by the Bel- 
fast Protestant artizans, had begun to drill. 
Unionist Clubs were formed throughout the pro- 
vince: volunteers were enrolled in defiance of the 
law, under the pretext of being associations 
formed for the purpose of taking " physical 
exercise," though with a growing feehng of 
strength and security this pretext was abandoned. 
Talk of " guns " and " cold steel " replaced 
arguments based upon economic conditions and 
the stringency of the " bonds of Empire." A 
theory of " loyalty " was developed compatible 
with a chartered license to defy the authority 
of King and Parliament in the affairs of the 
United Kingdom. As the inevitable day ap- 
proached when, by the provisions of the Par- 
liament Act, the Royal Assent to Home Rule 
must be given, the attitude of the Ulster leaders 
became more and more at variance with all 
loyal precedents. The Ulster Volunteer Force 
was organized as an army for service in the 
field: it was provided with signallers and despatch 
riders, with ambulance units and army nurses: hos- 
pitals were arranged to receive and tend the ex- 
pected " casualties " : plans were formed to seize 
strategic points in the province. A Provisional 
Government was constituted which on the day of 
the passing of the Act was to assume the govern- 
[133] 



ment of Ulster and replace the King's Govern- 
ment until such time as it might be advisable again 
to restore the dispossessed monarch to his Ulster 
dominions. The possibility of outside alliances 
was not left to chance. The Volunteers were 
heartened by the news that " the greatest Protes- 
tant monarch " in Europe had promised his aid: 
the Emperor of Germany would not stand idly by 
while Protestantism in Ireland was put by a 
British Government under the heel of Irish 
Cathohcs. Rifles were still lacking, but they were 
not long in being supplied. They were imported 
from Hamburg and landed in Larne ; and by means 
of a perfectly coordinated and admirable piece of 
organization distributed over Ulster within 
twenty-four hours. 

All Ireland, as if stunned by the shock, waited 
breathlessly to see what would happen. Nothing 
happened. The Liberal Government, with de- 
fiance shouted in its beard, decided that, no actual 
breach of the " law " having been committed, no 
prosecutions need take place. The Cabinet was 
of course in a very difficult position, for it had to 
reckon not with the Ulster Party only but with 
the Enghsh Tories as well. The latter had seen 
from the first the uses to which the Ulster Party 
might be put in the English political struggle. 
The Conservative party hoped by exploiting " the 
Ulster question " to bring about the downfall of 

[134] 



the Liberal Government: and the further the 
Ulster Party went, the more thoroughly they 
frightened moderate people in England by threats 
of bloodshed, anarchy and civil war, the better: 
the more truculent the threats of armed resistance 
the greater the probability that they need never 
be put into force. It was a dangerous game, but 
danger added zest to the amusement; and Irish 
parties, whether Unionist or Nationahst, were to 
English politicians persons of unaccountable 
vehemence whose ways were past finding out: in 
any case once they had served their turn they 
could quietly be shelved. The Cabinet seems to 
have considered that this alliance between the 
Ulster Party and the English Tories at once put 
the breach of the conventions of politics in Ulster 
under a kind of sanction and ensured that extreme 
action would never be taken in Ireland; for it 
would be absurd to assume that an English party 
would ever consent to the wild scheme of handing 
over Ulster interests to the charge of Germany; 
the rest would be, as it had always been, a matter 
of arrangement, of the expedients of which the 
Mother of Parliaments was still fertile. For 
whatever reason, then, the Cabinet decided to pro- 
test against the " unprecedented outrage " and 
leave the perpetrators to the judgment of poster- 
ity. But Nationalist Ireland was not inclined to 
see in the inaction of the Government merely the 
[135] 



inertia of perplexed politicians waiting for an un- 
precedented problem to point the way to its own 
solution. They knew by experience that had 
they imported arms, or proclaimed their intention 
of doing so, or publicly flouted the meanest of the 
Irish Executive, the Crimes Act would have been 
put into operation at once and his Majesty's 
prisons in Ireland would have been filled. They 
saw in the failure even to prosecute the Ulster 
leaders, to proclaim their organization, to deprive 
them of their arms, merely the traditional ten- 
derness of the British Government to its Irish 
" friends." They began to believe that neither 
English party was really sincere in anything con- 
nected with Ireland except in the desire, whether 
admitted or denied, to maintain the privileges and 
ascendancy of the Protestant interest. Mr. Red- 
mond was criticized with acrimony and vehemence 
for failing to do what he could not have done, 
and forcing the Cabinet to take action. When 
later the importation of arms into Ireland was 
prohibited by Order in Council, a proceeding of 
doubtful legality, this also was interpreted in 
malam partem: it was aimed not so much at pre- 
venting Ulster from getting more arms as at pre- 
venting the rest of Ireland from getting any. It 
was a piquant situation. Ulster, which had been 
for a century the backbone of the " loyalist " in- 
terest in Ireland, whose one publicly proclaimed 
[136] 



panacea for all Irish disorders and complaints had 
been " the firm and impartial administration of 
the law," which had called for the suppression of 
every attempt on the part of Nationalist Ireland 
even to express its national aspirations, was now 
openly contemptuous of the law, loud in its ex- 
pressions of defiance of the Government and 
charging the Cabinet, suspected of some faint de- 
termination to do something to assert itself, with 
" organizing a pogrom." On the other hand 
Nationalist Ireland, the supposed enemy of all 
law, order and even public decency, was lifting up 
its hands in horror at the insult to the majesty of 
British law and calling upon Its representatives In 
Parliament to do something, anything, to ensure 
respect for it. It called upon the Government to 
show itself to be In earnest, the Government being 
in reality as much in earnest as anybody. But, 
perplexed at the prospect of having to enforce the 
law in Ireland against the wrong people, the 
King's Government continued to eye the Ulster 
Government, each " willing to wound and yet 
afraid to strike." As a matter of fact the Ulster 
leaders, had they been put to the pinch, could not 
have made their authority really effective even in 
their own area : but with admirable and consum- 
mate audacity they succeeded In malting the fact 
seem so doubtful that any attempt to suppress 
them appeared to be involved in serious risk. 
[137] 



Among the Nationalists the only section which 
was able to use the situation to advantage 
was the Republican Party. To them it seemed 
incredible that any Irishman should be will- 
ing to fight either for or against such a 
measure as Home Rule, which gave Ireland 
a subordinate and Impoverished parliament and 
retained the Imperial connection practically unim- 
paired. But whatever the merits of the measure 
in itself it had in their eyes one wholly admirable 
result. It had for the first time since the days of 
the Fenians roused a section of Irishmen to arm 
against the British Government: and it had 
opened the eyes of all Irish Unionists, armed or 
unarmed in opposition to It, to the fact that the 
Interests of their party, courted and promoted in 
Ireland for a century In English interests, were as 
nothing to an Enghsh Government when the 
exigencies of party warfare required that they 
should be sacrificed. Their view was put forcibly 
and humorously by P. H. Pearse in an article con- 
tributed to Irish Freedom in 19 13. " It Is now," 
he wrote, " the creed of Irish nationalism (or at 
least of that Irish nationalism which Is vocal on 
platforms and In the Press) that the possession of 
arms and the knowledge of the use of arms is a fit 
subject for satire. To have a rifle is as ridiculous 
as to have a pimple at the end of your nose, or a 
bailiff waiting for you round the corner. To be 
[138] 



able to use a rifle is an accomplishment as futile 
as to be able to stand on your head or to be able 
to wag your ears. This is not the creed of any 
nationalism that exists or has ever existed in any 
community, civilized or uncivilized, that has ever 
inhabited the globe. It has never been the creed 
of Irish nationalism until this our day. Mitchel 
nd the great confessors of Irish nationalism would 
have laughed it to scorn. Mitchel indeed did 
laugh to scorn a similar but much less foolish 
doctrine of O'Connell's; and the generation that 
came after O'Connell rejected his doctrine and 
accepted Mitchel's. The present generation of 
Irish Nationalists is not only unfamiliar with arms 
but despises all who are familiar with arms. 
Irish Nationalists share with certain millionaires 
the distinction of being the only people who be- 
lieve in Universal Peace — here and now. . . . 
It is foolish of an Orangeman to believe that his 
personal liberty is threatened by Home Rule: but, 
granting that he believes that, it is not only in 
the highest degree common sense, but it is his 
clear duty to arm in defense of his threatened 
liberty. Personally, I think the Orangeman with 
a rifle a much less ridiculous figure than the 
Nationalist without a rifle; and the Orangeman 
who can fire a gun will certainly count for more 
in the end than the Nationalist who can do nothing 
cleverer than make a pun. ... I am not defend- 

[139] 



ing the Orangeman; I am only showing that his 
condemnation does not lie in the mouth of an 
unarmed Nationalist. . . . Negotiations might 
be opened with the Orangeman on these lines : 
You are creating a Provisional Government of 
Ulster — make it a Provisional Government of 
Ireland and we will recognize and obey it. 
O'Connell said long ago that he would rather be 
ruled by the old Protestant ascendancy Irish 
Parliament than by the Union Parliament; ' and 
O'Connell was right,' said Mitchel. He certainly 
was. . . . Any six Irishmen would be a better 
Government of Ireland than the English Cabinet 
has been. . . . Better exploit Ireland, for the 
benefit of Belfast than exploit her for the benefit 
of Westminster. A rapprochement between 
Orangemen and Nationalists would be difficult. 
The chief obstacles are the Orangeman's lack of 
humor and the Nationalist's lack of guns: each 
would be at a disadvantage in a conference. But 
a sense of humor can be cultivated, and guns can 
be purchased. One great source of misunder- 
standing has now disappeared: it has become clear 
within the last few years that the Orangeman is 
no more loyal to England than we are. He wants 
the Union because he imagines that it secures his 
prosperity: but he is ready to fire on the Union 
flag the moment it threatens his prosperity. 
The position is perfectly plain and understandable. 
[140] 



Foolish notions of loyalty to England being elimi- 
nated, it is a matter for businesslike negotia- 
tion. A Nationalist mission to North-east Ulster 
would possibly effect some good. The case might 
be put thus : Hitherto England has governed Ire- 
land through the Orange Lodges : she now pro- 
poses to govern Ireland through the A.O.H. 
You object: so do we. Why not unite and get rid 
of the English ? They are the real difficulty ; their 
presence here the real incongruity." When 
Pearse wrote this he seemed like a voice crying 
in the wilderness: but the echoes answered sooner 
than any one expected. Pearse afterwards con- 
fessed that this and other articles contributed by 
him at this time to Irish Freedom were written 
" with the deliberate intention by argument, 
invective, and satire, of goading those who shared 
my political views to commit themselves definitely 
to an armed movement." The armed movement 
which resulted was that of the Irish Volunteers. 



[141] 



ULSTER AND NATIONALIST IRELAND 

Nationalist Ireland had been officially com^ 
mitted to a peaceful and constitutional policy since 
the inception of the Home Rule Movement in 
1870. Home Rule did not satisfy, and was never 
admitted as satisfying, the national demand. But 
the Fenian Movement had at last driven into the 
heads of even Irish landlords and Tories that some 
concession to national sentiment was necessary if 
the government of Ireland was to be made a toler- 
able task for decent men. The Home Rule pro- 
gram was one in which Repealers and Conser- 
vatives agreed to join, the former in despair of 
getting anything better, the latter in despair of re- 
taining any longer all that they had. But once 
accepted by the Repealers it had committed them, 
in the necessities of the case, to a strictly parlia- 
mentary policy; and that policy continued to be 
pursued even after the necessities which caused it 
to be adopted ceased to operate. It was not a 
policy ever accepted without reservation by Irish 
Nationalists: a considerable body of them held 
aloof always from the Home Rulers, regretting 
the old virile ways and words of Mitchel and 
Davis, and regarding the Home Rule program 
as a Tory snare into whichTrish Nationalism had 
[142] 



fallen. The years of Parnell's leadership saw a 
nearer approach to national unanimity in the 
parliamentary policy than was seen before or has 
been seen since. But it was emphatically in the 
eyes of " strong " Nationalists a policy that could 
only be justified by results, and the results were 
slow to appear. When they appeared at last in the 
shape of a Home Rule Bill of the Asquith Min- 
istry there Is no doubt that if It had been carried 
and put into operation the advocates of a stronger 
policy would have been overborne by the men of 
moderate opinions. That is not to say that Home 
Rule would have been accepted by all coming 
generations as a satisfactory solution of the Irish 
situation; but it would have meant an immediate 
settling down of the country to the solution of 
many internal problems and the return to Ireland 
of something approaching the normal conditions 
of a civilized country. The prospect was shat- 
tered by the enrolling of the Ulster Volunteers. 
To the ordinary Home Ruler, the moderate Irish 
Nationalist, their action seemed to be a gross and 
unpardonable breach of faith. For a century 
Irish Unionists had uttered to Irish Nationalists 
the unvarying challenge to acknowledge and sub- 
mit to the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament: 
they had called upon Ireland to abandon its appeal 
to history and Its " impossible claims " to an inde- 
pendence which Parliament could never sanction. 
[143] 



The Home Rule Party had done so: no renuncia- 
tion of a claim to sovereign independence could be 
more explicit and unequivocal than that made by 
Mr. Redmond. So far as the Home Rule Party 
was concerned, they had agreed to all the terms 
imposed upon them: they had appealed to Parlia- 
ment, submitting to all the conditions implied in 
the recognition of it as the court of final resort, 
and now their opponents challenged in advance the 
competence of Parliament to decide, and fell back 
upon the weapons which Nationalist Ireland had 
been persuaded to abandon. But though the 
Ulster Unionists might break the pact, it was 
generally expected that the court to which they 
had taken their appeal would see that its com- 
petence to decide it was not challenged. The 
expectation was vain. The English Tory Party 
bluntly proclaimed that if Ulster decided to^ 
repudiate the verdict of Parliament, Ulster 
would be supported in any measure to that 
end which it should resolve to take. And in 
the face of this proclamation the Liberal Party 
seemed to hesitate: the Irish Party in Parliament 
could extract nothing from the Government 
beyond vague assurances that all would finally be 
well. Nationalist Ireland, surprised, uneasy, 
suspicious, indignant saw nothing more reassuring 
than broad smiles of indulgent benevolence upon 
the faces of Cabinet Ministers. 

[144] 



But Ulster Unionists were not the only people 
in Ireland who disliked Home Rule. It was just 
as little to the taste of Sinn Fein and the Repub- 
licans and the Labor Party as it was to them. 
If the Ulster Party thought that Home Rule was 
too great a concession, the others thought that it 
was practically no concession at all. But being 
in a minority they were prepared for the present 
to submit. The Sinn Fein Party and the Repub- 
licans were well aware that Home Rule meant a 
set back to their program. Little as it con- 
ferred in comparison with what they wished to 
have, it was certain to allay for many years the 
sting of Irish discontent and to prolong the period 
during which Ireland would seek its satisfaction 
in the shadow of its coming fortunes. The Labor 
Party had already begun to organize its forces 
with a view to participation in the activities of the 
expected Parliament, and looked forward with a 
modest confidence to its immediate future. To 
all of these the arming of Ulster, which made the 
Parliamentarians so indignant, was a light in the 
darkness. They had been for years protesting 
unheeded against a policy which acknowledged the 
Act of Union by acknowledging the supremacy of 
the Parliament which it set up: their words had 
fallen for the most part upon stopped ears. And 
now from the party supposed to regard the 
supremacy of Parliament as on a level with the 

[145] 



Ten Commandments came the mutterings of revolt 
and the rattle of arms. Ulster had decided to 
defy " the English edict which would keep Irish- 
men disarmed while the meanest Englishman may 
arm himself to the teeth"; Ulster had taken up 
arms " against the usurped authority of the Par- 
liament of Great Britain to make laws to bind 
them." Sinn Fein promised that Unionist Ulster 
would in its coming struggle with the English Par- 
liament " receive the sympathy and support of 
Nationalist Ireland." From the Republican 
Party the action of the Volunteers received un- 
stinted and enthusiastic commendation. " Ulster 
has done one thing," wrote Irish Freedom, " which 
commands the respect and admiration of all gen- 
uine Nationalists — she has stood up for what she 
believes to be right and will be cajoled neither by 
English threats nor English bayonets. Her 
attitude in this affair is the attitude of the O'Neills 
and the O'Donnells: no other people but an Irish 
people could do it and something of the kind was 
very necessary to shame the rest of Ireland out of 
J.P.-ships and jobs into some facing of the facts. 
... In present circumstances accursed be the 
soul of any Nationalist who would dream of firing 
a shot or drawing a sword against the Ulster Vol- 
unteers in connection with this Bill. Any such 
action would be an enforcement of a British law 
upon an Irish populace which refused it, would 
[146] 



be a marshalling under the Union Jack. We are 
wiUing to fight Ulster or to negotiate with her, 
but we will not fight her over the miserable shadow 
of autonomy, we will not fight her because she tells 
England to go to Hell." *' The sheen of arms in 
Ulster was always the signal for the rest of Ire- 
land. And Ireland even in this generation, 
hypnotized as most of her people are by catch 
cries about ' imperiling Home Rule,' by mockeries 
of all ' wild ' politics and ' wild ' plans, by doc- 
trines even more debasing in their shameless lying 
than O'Connell's, Ireland has answered the call." 
But to see in a revolt against a particular Act 
of Parliament a revolt against the supremacy of 
Parliament simpliciter was a mistake. Ulster was 
willing, anxious indeed, that the supremacy of the 
Imperial Parliament should be 'maintained in 
Ireland, but she made one condition: that Parlia- 
ment should ensure in Ireland the Protestant 
Ascendancy. For that Ulster Protestantism pro- 
fessed to be prepared to fight to the death. It 
was secured by the Legislative Union; and to 
weaken the Union was to weaken it. So long as 
Ireland formed " an integral part of the United 
Kingdom," so long as Catholic Irishmen were in a 
permanent minority in the Parliament of that 
kingdom, so long did it seem certain that the 
Protestant interest would be secure. Protestant 
England was considered to have made a pact with 
[147] 



Protestant Ulster, and Ulster was prepared to 
enforce Its observance even by force of arms. 
Ulster trembled when the shadow of the Vatican 
fell across her as men once trembled at an eclipse 
of the sun: and the Union seemed the only 
guarantee that recurrent eclipses would not be the 
harbingers of a perpetual darkness. 

And whatever elements of hope for the future 
Sinn Fein and Republican Ireland might see in 
the attitude of the Ulster Volunteers towards 
England it was plain that while they might be 
praised and imitated they could not be followed. 
They were a strictly sectarian force formed to 
promote a strictly sectarian object, while Sinn 
Feiners and Republicans stood for the union of 
all Irishmen without distinction of creed. And 
their close (and, as it seemed to many Irishmen, 
unnatural) alliance with the English Tory Party 
was clear proof that their revolt (so far as It 
went) against the authority of Parliament could 
and would be utilized to the greater advantage of 
England and the detriment of Ireland. Ulster 
might propose to fight for her own hand and her 
own position In Ireland, but her English allies 
would see to It that nothing which Ulster gained 
would be lost to England. The moral to be 
drawn was that Ulster being part of Ireland 
was, however wayward and bitter, to be treated 
with consideration and respect; her fears for her 
[148] 



safety to be allayed; even her prejudices to be 
considered and met; her incipient feeling of resent- 
ment against England applauded and encouraged. 
So far and no farther Irish Nationalists could go: 
but Ulster's claim to ascendancy could not for a 
moment be recognized. Meanwhile the rest of 
Ireland should follow the example of the North 
and arm In defense of a threatened liberty. 

This was the attitude not merely of Sinn Feiners 
and Republicans, but of many followers of the 
Parliamentary Party. But the bulk of the parlia- 
mentarians took a different view. Some of them 
deprecated all appeals to violence on the part of 
Irish Nationalists and held that it was the business 
of Parliament to enforce its own authority upon 
the recalcitrants: others thought nothing should 
be done, because nothing need be done, Ulster 
being accustomed to threaten, but never being 
known to strike : others again thought that the 
Ulster threats should be countered by threats as 
determined, backed by means not less efficacious. 

The last of these Nationalist sections joined 
with the Republicans and some of the Sinn Feiners, 
Sinn Fein still officially adhering to its traditional 
policy, to form, in imitation of the Ulstermen, the 
force of the Irish Volunteers. The promoters of 
the movement were anxious to avoid all appear- 
ance of opposition to a body of Irishmen whom, 
however they might differ from them and no 
[149] 



matter what collisions with them might occur 
later, they respected for their vigor and resolu- 
tion: on the other hand they desired to make it 
perfectly plain that Ulster was not the only part 
of Ireland that had the courage to proclaim Its 
intention of standing up for Its rights. At a 
meeting held in the Rotunda in Dublin on 
November 25, 19 13, the movement was publicly 
Inaugurated. 

Of the committee which took charge of the 
movement during its earlier stages some were (or 
had been) supporters of Sinn Fein, others were 
Republicans, more than a third were supporters of 
the Parliamentary Party and a few had never 
identified themselves with any Irish political party 
of any kind. And the manifesto to the Irish 
people Issued by the committee bore clear indica- 
tions of Its composite origin. It took sides 
neither with nor against any form of Irish Na- 
tionalism and It contained no word of hostility 
against the Ulster force. " The object pro- 
posed," It said, " for the Irish Volunteers Is to 
secure and maintain the rights and liberties com- 
mon to all the people of Ireland. Their duties 
will be defensive and protective, and they will not 
contemplate either aggression or domination. 
Their ranks are open to all able-bodied Irishmen 
without distinction of creed, politics or social 
grade. ... In the name of National Unity, of 

[150] 



National Dignity, of National and Individual 
Liberty, of Manly Citizenship, we appeal to our 
countrymen to recognize and accept without hesi- 
tation the opportunity that has been granted them 
to join the ranks of the Irish Volunteers, and to 
make the movement now begun not unworthy of 
the historic title which it has adopted." Volun- 
teers were to sign a declaration that they desired 
" to be enrolled in the Irish Volunteers formed to 
secure and maintain the rights and liberties com- 
mon to all the people of Ireland without distinc- 
tion of creed, class or politics." The final words 
of the declaration were in answer to the charge, 
printed in an English newspaper a few days 
before, that the new movement was to form 
a Volunteer force of Catholics in hostility 
to Protestants, and an answer by anticipation 
to the charge, made freely afterwards, that the 
Volunteers were intended to deprive Unionist 
Ulster of her just rights. The attitude deliber- 
ately adopted towards Ulster could not have 
been better put than it was by the President 
of the Volunteers, professor Eoin MacNeill, 
in his speech at the inaugural meeting. " We do 
not contemplate," he said, " any hostility to the 
Volunteer movement that has already been ini- 
tiated in parts of Ulster, The strength of that 
movement consists in men whose kinsfolk were 
amongst the foremost and the most resolute in 

["SI] 



winning freedom for the United States of America, 
in descendants of tlie Irish Volunteers of 1782, of 
the United Irishmen, of the Antrim and Down 
insurgents of 1798, of the Ulster Protestants who 
protested in thousands against the destruction of 
the Irish Parliament in 1800. The more genuine 
and successful the local Volunteer movement in 
Ulster becomes, the more completely does it estab- 
lish the principle that Irishmen have the right to 
decide and govern their own national affairs. 
We have nothing to fear from the existing Volun- 
teers in Ulster nor they from us. We gladly 
acknowledge the evident truth that they have 
opened the way for a National Volunteer move- 
ment, and we trust that the day is near when their 
own services to the cause of an Irish nation will 
become as memorable as the services of their 
forefathers." 

This was noble and chivalrous language and it 
loses none of its force when one recollects that 
many of the platforms in Ulster were ringing at 
the time with denunciations of " our hereditary 
enemies " and with references to Irish Catholics 
as " hewers of wood and drawers of water," " the 
men whom we hate and despise." 

But in spite of the fact that the leaders of the 
Irish Volunteers wished to preserve, and largely 
succeeded in preserving, a non-provocative attitude 
towards the Ulstermen, the governing facts of the 

[152] 



situation could hardly be ignored completely. 
Phrases used at meetings for the enrollment of 
Irish Volunteers appreciative of the spirit of 
Ulster were strongly resented by many National- 
ists who saw in the Ulster Volunteers a menace not 
to the English exploitation of Ireland but to the 
national hopes. And even the leading spirits in 
the movement could not conceal the fact that the 
Ulster Volunteers, whatever they might prove to 
be in the future, were certainly a present obstacle 
to the attainment of Home Rule, which, little 
regarded by Sinn Fein and the Republicans as a 
final settlement, was undoubtedly the only ap- 
Droach to a settlement that could be looked for 
in the near future. The blame of this it was 
sought to throw on the English Tory Party. " A 
use has been made," said Professor MacNeill, 
" and is daily made, of the Ulster Volunteer 
movement, that leaves the whole body of Irishmen 
no choice but to take a firm stand in defense of 
their liberties. The leaders of the Unionist Party 
in Great Britain and the journalists, public 
speakers and election agents of that party are 
employing the threat of armed force to control the 
course of political elections and to compel, if they 
can, a change of Government in England with 
the declared object of deciding what all parties 
admit to be vital political issues concerning Ire- 
land. They claim that this line of action has been 

[153] 



successful in recent parliamentary elections and 
that they calculate by it to obtain further successes, 
and at the most moderate estimate to force upon 
this country some diminished and mutilated form 
of National Self-Government, This is not merely 
to deny our rights as a nation. If we are to have 
our concerns regulated by a majority of British 
representatives owing their position and powers 
to a display of armed force, no matter from what 
quarter that force Is derived, it is plain to every 
man that even the modicum of civil rights left to 
us by the Union is taken from us, our franchise 
becomes a mockery and we ourselves become the 
most degraded nation in Europe. This insolent 
menace does not satisfy the hereditary enemies of 
our National Freedom. Within the past few days 
a political manifesto has been issued, signed most 
fittingly by a Castlereagh and a Beresford, calling 
for British Volunteers and for money to arm and 
equip them to be sent into Ireland to triumph 
over the Irish people and to complete their dis- 
franchisement and enslavement." 

All this was true, but it was only half the truth. 
It was true that the Tory Party was making use 
of the threat of armed force; but the threat had 
been made before the Tory Party could make use 
of It, and it had been made by a body of armed 
Irishmen. But the followers were, as often 
happens, less virulent than their leaders; and 
[154] 



months after this the sight might have been wit- 
nessed in Belfast of Ulster Volunteers and Irish 
Volunteers using the same drill ground through 
the good offices of a tolerant Ulsterman: and 
though the Ulster Volunteers were prepared un- 
doubtedly to fight for their privileges, some of the 
most vicious appeals to their passions and their 
prejudices came from men who were not of the 
Ulster, not even of the Irish, blood. Right 
through their tragic and tempestuous career the 
Irish Volunteers in spite of countless difficulties 
and provocations continued their attitude of punc- 
tihous courtesy to the Ulster force. When the 
Ulstermen succeeded in their great coup of run- 
ning a cargo of rifles from Hamburg to Larne the 
Irish Volunteer congratulated them heartily and 
warmly. Their attitude towards their fellow- 
countrymen was deeply regretted, but for what 
they had done to assert the freedom of Irishmen 
from English dictation they were accorded 
generous praise. The spirit of the leaders in this 
matter permeated the force. The head of the 
Irish Volunteers in Tralee wrote at a time when 
threats of suppressing the Ulstermen with the 
help of the army were made : " To my mind the 
Volunteers should prevent if possible and by force 
the English soldiers attacking the Ulster rebels. 
Say to the English soldiers and to the English 
Government, ' This is our soil and the Ulster 
[155] 



rebels are our countrymen; fire on them and you 
fire on us.' . . . Ulster is not our real enemy, 
though. . . . Ulster thinks we are her enemy. 
Time will prove who are Ulster's friends and 
ours." 

But the history of the Irish Volunteers, though 
indispensable for the understanding of the devel- 
opment of Sinn Fein, is not the history of Sinn 
Fein, Individual Sinn Feiners were prominent in 
the movement and brought into it the spirit of 
national unity and disregard of the differences of 
creed which kept Irishmen divided: but the Sinn 
Fein organization remained distinct, praising, 
warning and criticizing the new movement and the 
tactics of its leaders. It pointed out at once that 
for the Volunteers to combine and to drill was 
not enough: they must have rifles and rifle ranges, 
and urged that the provision of them should 
be seen to without delay. But though it wished 
the Volunteers to be equipped as effectively 
and as quickly as possible it still regarded 
an armed force of Irishmen as inadequate 
to the task of winning Irish freedom. " To 
help the Volunteer movement," said Sinn Fein, 
"is a national duty: they may not defeat 
England, but the movement will help to make 
Ireland self-reliant." And Sinn Fein was em- 
phatic in urging the dangers of a sectional 
policy, of any attempt to narrow the basis 

[156] 



upon which the new force was to be built up. 
" It is better," ran a leader on the subject, " at 
the beginning of the National Volunteer move- 
ment there should be frank speaking and frank 
understanding. If it were designed to be a move- 
ment confined to or controlled by any one Na- 
tionalist section we would not write a word in its 
support. It would fail badly. ... It is quite 
true that we must work through public opinion 
in the circumstances of Ireland rather than 
through force of arms, but it is a poor thinker 
who does not realize that the public opinion which 
lacks the confidence, the calmness, the steadiness, 
the judgment, the resolution and the understand' 
ing which a training in arms gives a people is a 
poor weapon to rely upon in times of crisis." The 
Volunteers were in the opinion of Sinn Fein a 
useful auxiliary in the task of developing the one 
quality from which alone ultimate success was to 
be expected, the self-reliance and moral resolution 

of the Irish people. But airo? Ic^iXKtTai avZpa 

aiBrjpo's — the mere "sheen of arms" has an 
attraction superior to all arguments and all 
policies: and there is little doubt that the superior 
attractions of the Volunteers proved too strong for 
many young and ardent Sinn Feiners and induced 
them to put the means first and the end second. 
The phrase of hish Freedom in noticing the 
Inauguration of the Volunteers probably gives the 

[157] 



view of most of the younger generation: " In this 
welcome departure from our endless talk we touch 
reality at last." 

The Irish Volunteers were not the only militant 
body which the example of Ulster had formed in 
Ireland. While the Ulster campaign was in full 
swing the workers of Dublin had been engaged in 
a bitter industrial struggle with their employers 
in which after a prolonged battle victory had 
somewhat doubtfully declared itself against them. 
The Labor leader, Jim Larkin, decided to found 
a Citizen Army for Irish workers. " Labor," he 
said in addressing the meeting at which the new 
force was inaugurated, " in its own defense must 
begin to train itself to act with disciplined courage 
and with organized and concentrated force. How 
could they accomplish this? By taking a leaf out 
of the book of Carson. If Carson had permission 
to train his braves of the North to fight against the 
aspirations of the Irish people, then it was legiti- 
mate and fair for Labor to organize in the same 
militant way to preserve their rights and to ensure 
that if they were attacked they would be able to 
give a very satisfactory account of themselves." 
He went on to say that the object of the Citizen 
Army was " that Labor might no longer be de- 
fenseless but might be able to utilize that great 
physical power which it possessed to prevent their 

[158] 



elemental rights from being taken from them and 
to evolve such a system of unified action, self- 
control and ordered discipline that Labor in Ire- 
land might march in the forefront of all move- 
ments for the betterment of the whole people of 
Ireland." The Citizen Army thus formed, never 
very numerous, efficient or enthusiastic, was prac- 
tically destroyed by the formation of the Irish 
Volunteers. Most of its members joined the 
Volunteers, partly because they were the more 
numerous and popular body, but principally be- 
cause a national policy had more attraction for 
them than one which was purely sectional. Cap- 
tain White, who had trained the first Citizen 
Army, now urged that It should be reorganized 
upon a broader basis and in March, 19 14, the 
Citizen Army, which afterwards played such a 
memorable part, was put upon its final footing. 
The new constitution was as follows: "That the 
first and last principle of the Irish Citizen is the 
avowal that the ownership of Ireland, moral and 
material, Is vested of right in the people of Ire- 
land: that the Irish Citizen Army shall stand for 
the absolute unity of Irish nationhood and shall 
support the rights and liberties of the democracies 
of all nations: that one of its objects shall be to 
sink all differences of birth, property and creed 
under the common name of the Irish People: that 

[159] 



the Citizen Army shall be open to all who accept 
the principle of equal rights and opportunities for 
the Irish People." 

It might have seemed that the constitution and 
principles of the Citizen Army were wide enough 
and national enough to justify a union or at least 
a close cooperation with the Irish Volunteers. 
But at first the two bodies held sternly aloof. 
The Labor party had not been invited to send 
representatives to the meeting at which the 
Volunteers had been inaugurated, and many of the 
Volunteer Committee were suspected, rightly or 
wrongly, of being entirely out of sympathy with 
Labor ideals and Labor policy. When members 
of the Labor Party began to flock into the 
Volunteer ranks their action was the occasion 
of a bitter controversy in the official Labor organ. 
The Sinn Fein movement, whose spirit was sup- 
posed to preside over the Volunteer organization, 
had never been on cordial terms with organized 
Labor, and the members of the Irish Citizen 
Army were publicly warned to keep clear of these 
" Girondin politicians, who will simply use the 
workers as the means towards their own security 
and comfort." Nor were the members of the 
Ancient Order of Hibernians and of the United 
Irish League who belonged to the Volunteer Com- 
mittee any more to the taste of Labor; they 
regarded these two bodies as bitter and implacable 
[1 60] 



opponents of their rights. Regarding themselves 
as the true successors of the Nationalism of Wolfe 
Tone and John Mitchel, they called upon the 
Volunteers for an explicit declaration of what was 
meant by " the rights common to all Irishmen " 
which they were enrolled to maintain. Did they 
mean the right to Home Rule, or to the constitu- 
tion of 1782 or to an Irish Republic? The 
Volunteers could not have said " Yes " to any one 
of the three alternatives without driving out mem- 
bers who desired to say " Yes " to one or other of 
the remaining two. The Volunteers had deliber- 
ately left in abeyance controversies which the 
Labor Army wished to fight out in advance. 
They, undoubtedly, desired a Republic and meant 
to say so. When it was announced that the Irish 
Volunteers would be under the control of the Irish 
Parliament (when there should be such a body to 
control them) Labor became more suspicious 
still; was not the only Irish Parliament even in 
contemplation to be subordinate to the Parliament 
of England ? The Volunteers seemed to treat the 
Citizen Army with Indifference, if not with con- 
tempt: and a bitter antagonism was developed 
which only common misfortune was able to miti- 
gate. 

In all this welter of sharp antagonisms and 
conflicting policies the only party which walked 
in the old political ways was the Parliamentary 
[161] 



Party. They expected confidently that political 
conventions would finally be observed or that 
Parliament would deal effectively with those who 
tried to break them. It was becoming plain, 
however, as time went on that the conventions 
were not going to be regarded and that Parliament 
was as likely as not to acquiesce in the breach of 
them. And the Party was not aware of the 
change that was slowly passing over Ireland. A 
long tenure of their place among the great person- 
ages and amid the high doings of Westminster 
seemed to have made them somewhat oblivious of 
the fact that Irish politics are made in Ireland. 
They did not feel the thrill of chastened pride that 
shivered gently through Ireland when the quiet 
places of Ulster echoed to the march of the Ulster 
Volunteers. They did not know how many Irish- 
men regarded the action of Ulster not as a menace 
to the dignity of the Parliament in which the Party 
sat but as the harbinger of national independence. 
They underrated (as who then did not?) the 
influence of Sinn Fein; they regarded the founda- 
tion of the Irish Volunteers as the work of " irre- 
sponsible young men," though the " young men " 
were nearer the heart of Young Ireland: like 
O'Connell, they " stood for Old Ireland and had 
some notion that Old Ireland would stand by 
them." Ireland, though no one guessed it at the 
time, was the crucible in which were slowly melt- 
[162] 



ing and settling down all the elements that were 
to go to the making of the future Sinn Fein. 

Sinn Fein was at the time to all outward seeming 
an insignificant and discredited party with an 
impossible program. It still published a small 
weekly paper with no great circulation. It did 
not agree with the parliamentarians: it had a 
standing feud with the Labor Party: it gave a 
dignified and pontifical blessing to the Volunteers 
without committing itself to their whole pro- 
gram. Its only electioneering venture, outside 
municipal politics, had been a disastrous failure: 
it had won a few seats on the Dublin City Council : 
it had tried and failed to run a daily paper. 
When all Nationalist Ireland was waiting for 
Home Rule it declared Home Rule to be a thing 
of naught. To the buoyant confidence of the 
Parliamentary Party it opposed a cynical distrust 
of their alms and methods, a constant Incredulity 
of their ultimate success. When the Party 
pointed to what It had done and to what it was 
about to do, Sinn Fein reminded the country that 
the very existence of a Parliamentary Party was 
an acknowledgment of the Act of Union. When 
the Liberal Government was engaged In an embit- 
tered and apparently final struggle for supremacy 
with the Tory Party In the Interests of Ireland, 
Sinn Fein professed entire disbelief in its sincerity; 
it asserted that the Liberals really loved the Tories 
[163] 



very much better than they loved the Irish. With 
a querulous and monotonous insistence it preached 
distrust of all English parties and even of the 
English nation, towards whom it displayed a 
hostility that seemed almost to amount to a 
monomania. To Irish Labor this indiscriminat- 
ing attitude seemed insensate bigotry : to the Irish 
people as a whole it seemed incomprehensible that 
a Nationalist Party should regard the Liberals 
as enemies and the Ulster Volunteers as brothers 
in arms. Sinn Fein never seemed less certain of 
a future in Ireland than when events were pre- 
paring to make Ireland Sinn Fein. 

Early in 19 14 Sinn Fein saw in the King's 
Speech at the opening of Parliament indications 
that the Cabinet and the Opposition had arranged 
" a deal " over Home Rule and foretold an at- 
tempt at compromise. The next month the Prime 
Minister proposed the partition of Ireland be- 
tween the Unionists and the Nationalists and the 
Irish Party accepted the proposal as a temporary 
device to ease the parliamentary situation for the 
Cabinet. No proposal better calculated to offend 
the deepest instincts of Irish nationalism could 
have been made : no concession more fatal to the 
party which agreed to it could have been devised. 
The mention of it provoked an outburst in Ireland 
which did more to smash the Parliamentary Party 
and leave the field open to their rivals than any- 
[164] 



thing which had happened since Home Rule was 
first mooted. The criticisms passed upon it by the 
non-Parhamentary Nationalists were important, 
not so much on account of the quarters they came 
from, as for the grounds on which they were made, 
and their words awakened deeper feelings than 
had come to the surface for years. " To even 
discuss," said Sinn Fein, " the exclusion of Ulster 
or any portion of Ulster from a Home Rule 
measure is in itself traitorous. When God made 
this country. He fixed its frontiers beyond the 
power of man to alter while the sea rises and falls. 
... So long as England is strong and Ireland is 
weak, England may continue to oppress this coun- 
try, but she shall not dismember it." " If this na- 
tion is to go down," wrote Irish Freedom, " let it 
go down gallantly as becomes its history, let it go 
down fighting, but let it not sink into the abjectness 
of carving a slice out of itself and handing it over 
to England. ... As for Ulster, Ulster is Ire- 
land's and shall remain Ireland's. Though the 
Irish nation in its political and corporate 
capacity were gall and wormwood to every 
Unionist in Ulster yet shall they swallow it. We 
will fight them if they want fighting: but we shall 
never let them go, never." Sinn Fein and the 
Republicans were no more emphatic than the 
Labor Party. James Connolly in the Irish 
Worker said of Partition: "To it Labor should 

[■65] 



give the bitterest opposition, against it Labor In 
Ulster should fight even to the death If necessary 
as our fathers fought before us." It even used the 
menace of partition as an argument In favor of 
joining the Citizen Army and urged that Volun- 
teers should transfer their membership to a body 
which " meant business." " The Citizen Army," 
said an article signed with the initials of one of 
Its principle organizers, " stands for Ireland 
— Orange and Green — one and indivisible. The 
men who tread the valleys and places CuchuUain, 
Conall Cearnach, Russell and McCracken trod are 
bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. Because 
they may have a different creed does not matter 
to us; it never mattered to the Government: an 
Irish Protestant corpse dangled as often at the end 
of a rope as did the corpse of an Irish Cathohc." 
But Sinn Fein saw that, though partition was 
unacceptable, It was no use continually asking the 
Ulstermen to name the safeguards they wanted. 
They would not name what they did not want: 
no safeguards would secure them in a democratic 
modern community against their chief objection 
to Home Rule — that in an Irish Parliament 
Protestants, as such, would be in " a permanent 
minority," It was of the very nature of things 
that they should be, if representative Institutions 
were to be recognized at all. But though in a 
minority they need not be, as they asserted they 
[i66] 



would be, subject to disabilities, and Sinn Fein 
held that every offer to allay their fears compatible 
with free institutions should be made. A Sinn 
Fein Convention held in Dublin towards the end 
of April, 19 14, agreed to make the Ulstermen, on 
behalf of Sinn Fein, the following proposals : ( i ) , 
increased representation in the Irish Parliament on 
the basis partly of population, partly of ratable 
value and partly of bulk of trade, the Ulster 
representation to be increased by fifteen members 
including one for the University of Belfast: two 
members to be given to the Unionist constituency 
of Rathmlnes; (2), to fix all Ireland as the unit 
for the election of the Senate or Upper House and 
to secure representation to the Southern Unionist 
minority by Proportional Representation; (3), to 
guarantee that no tax should be imposed on the 
linen trade without the consent of a majority of 
the Ulster representatives; (4), that the Chair- 
man of the Joint Exchequer Board should always 
be chosen by the Ulster Representatives; (5), that 
all posts in the Civil Service should be filled by 
examination; (6), that the Ulster Volunteer Force 
should be retained under its present leaders as 
portion of an Irish Volunteer Force and should 
not, except in case of invasion, be called upon to 
serve outside Ulster; (7), that the Irish Parlia- 
ment should sit alternately in Dublin and in 
Belfast; (8), that the clauses in the Home Rule 
[167] 



Bill restricting Irish trade and finance and pro- 
hibiting Ireland from collecting and receiving its 
own taxes, or otherwise conflicting with any of the 
above proposals, should be amended. These pro- 
posals, the most statesmanlike and generous pro- 
posals put forward on the Nationalist side, were, 
though approved of generally by the Belfast 
Trades Council, contemptuously ignored by the 
Ulster leaders. 

The offer of partition likewise was promptly 
rejected by Ulster: like the Irish Citizen Army 
they " meant business." They meant to smash 
Home Rule for good and all, for the South as well 
as for the North of Ireland, and in conjunction 
with the English Tories they felt strong enough 
to do It. They began openly to tamper with the 
allegiance of the army. Nor were their efforts 
without success. Not only did large numbers of 
ex-ofl'icers offer their services to the Ulster 
Volunteers, but many officers upon the active list 
announced their intention of refusing to obey 
orders if despatched to preserve order in Ulster 
and forestall the intention, broadly hinted, of some 
of the Ulstermen to seize military depots in the 
province. It was an open boast in Belfast that the 
ship conveying the arms from Hamburg to Ulster 
had been sighted, but allowed to pass unchallenged 
by officers of the Royal Navy on the ships detailed 
to intercept it. They seemed deliberately to have 
[i68] 



adopted the policy of Catiline, ruina exstinguere 
incendlum, " to put out the fire by pulling down 
the house." If the Protestant interest were to go 
down in Ireland, then should the British Constitu- 
tion which had fostered it go down with it. 

All this was, of course, matter for unfeigned 
delight to all the " advanced " people both in 
Ireland and outside of it. If officers were to have 
the option of obeying orders or not at their will 
why should a like latitude be denied the common 
soldier? If officers refused to act against Ulster 
why should a private be required to fire upon 
strikers? Thanks were publicly returned by 
Irish Freedom to " the gallant British officers who 
have helped their beloved Empire on to the brink 
above the precipice." But so far as England was 
concerned, the crisis was tided over by the usual 
method of compromise. There had been a " mis- 
understanding " for which both sides were more or 
less responsible. There had been no actual 
intention of employing force in a political dispute 
and therefore the question in debate did not arise. 
The Minister of War was dismissed on a side 
issue, the Premier assumed his responsibilities and 
everybody was more or less satisfied, except the 
Irish. 

Whatever were the rights or wrongs of the dis- 
pute between the Army and the Government, it 
was plain that the dispute had been composed at 
[169] 



the expense of Home Rule. Partition in some 
form or other was now certain to accompany 
Home Rule, if Home Rule were not actually 
shelved. The Irish Party were solemnly warned 
by the advanced Nationalist papers. " Mr. Red- 
mond has had his chance," wrote one of these. 
" When partition is again mentioned, let him stand 
aside even at the cost of the ' Home Rule ' Bill. 
There is a force and a spirit growing in Ireland 
which in the wrangle of British politics he but 
vaguely realizes." 

But Mr. Redmond was not so preoccupied with 
" the wrangle of British politics " as he seemed. 
He realized quite clearly that the Irish Volunteers 
were growing in numbers and in influence and that 
neither their object nor their existence was com- 
patible with the principles of Home Rule. They 
proclaimed their intention of putting themselves 
eventually at the disposal of the Irish Parliament: 
but the Bill contemplated a Parliament which 
should have no right to accept their services. 
They were largely controlled by men who thought 
little of Home Rule and everything of the " rights 
of Irishmen," which might mean just what the 
Liberal Government proposed to give but might 
also mean a great deal more. They were a 
menace to the success of the parliamentary policy, 
and it seemed to be his plain duty to suppress or to 
control them. To attempt suppression would be 
[170] 



dangerous : to control them seemed not impossible. 
He decided to demand the right to nominate on 
their committee twenty-five " tried and true " 
Nationahsts whose allegiance to his policy was 
unquestioned. The committee, faced by the alter- 
native of either declaring war on Mr. Redmond 
(a course as dangerous to them as to declare war 
on them would have been to him) or of submitting 
to his demand, decided to submit. The twenty- 
five new members (four of whom were priests and 
the majority of the remainder Dublin National- 
ists) joined the Committee and the Irish " mili- 
tary crisis " seemed to have been solved. In re- 
ality it was only beginning. The Citizen Army 
promptly declared war upon the reconstituted 
Volunteer Committee. " Is there," asked The 
Irish Worker, " one reliable man at the head of 
the National Volunteer movement apart from 
Casement who, we believe, is in earnest and 
honest? . . . We admit the bulk of the rank and 
file are men of principle and men who are out for 
liberty for all men: but why allow the foulest 
growth that ever cursed this land (the Hibernian 
Board of Erin) to control an organization that 
might if properly handled accomplish great 
things." It accused the committee of having 
passed the Volunteers over to a " gang of place- 
hunters and political thugs " and called upon the 
rank and file to sever all connection with them: 

[171] 



" Our fathers died that we might be free men. 
Are we going to allow their sacrifices to be as 
nought? Or are we going to follow in their foot- 
steps at the Rising of the Moon? " The Citizen 
Army was gradually coming round to a standpoint 
more and more national, and saw in the control 
of the Volunteers by the Parliamentarians nothing 
but disaster to its idea of what nationalism 
involved. Sinn Fein was equally vehement: 
" Redmond is only a tool," it wrote, " in the 
hands of Asquith and Birrell who wish to destroy 
the Volunteers as Lord Northington was a tool in 
the hands of Fox, to whom he wrote in 1783: 
* They have got too powerful, and there is nothing 
for us but for our friends to go into their meet- 
ings and disturb the harmony of them and create 
division.' " When Mr. Redmond appealed to 
America for money to " strengthen " the Volun- 
teers it pointed out that if he had been in earnest 
he would have asked not for money but for arms, 
and would have had the Arms Proclamation with- 
drawn by the Government. It printed a series of 
letters to the Volunteers, of which the first con- 
tained the words: " The object [i.e. of the Volun- 
teers] is obtaining and maintaining the independ- 
ence of Ireland. Those who are in earnest 
should have their own committee, independent of 
Redmond and Co." Irish Freedom headed its 
leader on the transaction " The Kiss of Judas," 
[172] 



and declared that " after the British Government 
the Irish Parliamentary Party in its later years 
has been the most evil force in Ireland." 

The original members of the Volunteer Com- 
mittee were clearly uneasy and tried to put the 
best face they could upon the matter. In their 
official organ, The Irish Volunteer, they informed 
the public, " The control of the committee by Mr. 
John Redmond does not matter, provided his 
nominees represent the feelings of the Volunteers; 
if they do the Irish Party will see to the with- 
drawing of the Arms Proclamation and proceed to 
arm the Volunteers at once." But the Irish Party 
did neither; and if Mr. Redmond was expected 
to share the feelings of the Volunteers, the Volun- 
teers cannot have shared the feelings of the 
committee. A month before this the Irish 
Volunteer had printed the following: " For over 
a generation Ireland has taken her national views 
from men whose whole lives were bound up with 
the preservation of peace. Suddenly, in a day, 
in an hour, the whole situation has undergone a 
change. Force has reappeared as a factor in Irish 
political life. ... It is to be hoped that men 
are not joining the national army from any mo- 
tives but those which actuated the founders. 
The object of the Volunteers is to maintain and 
preserve the rights and liberties common to the 
whole people of Ireland. There is no question of 
[173] 



preserving merely the ' legal ' rights graciously 
permitted us by a foreign power." If the original 
committee seriously expected Mr. Redmond and 
his nominees to acquiesce in the views expressed 
in the last sentence they must have been simple to 
a degree. They were admittedly in a difficult 
position; but they knew what they meant and 
they knew what Mr. Redmond meant; and the 
sequel might have been foreseen. 

It was put upon record later by a member of the 
committee that in the task of arming the Volun- 
teers the new members gave little effective assist- 
ance, and that when arms were obtained they tried 
to have them taken from the men who had paid for 
them and handed over gratis to the Hibernians of 
the North to use (without, it is true, a supply of 
ammunition) to overawe the aggression of the 
Ulster Volunteers. But the members of the 
original committee procured arms upon their own 
responsibility. In July they succeeded in imi- 
tating the exploit of the Ulstermen at Larne. 
They ran a cargo of rifles into Howth and another 
was landed at Kilcool. But the forces of the 
Crown, absent at Larne and inactive in Ulster 
ever since, displayed their unsuccessful vigor at 
Howth. The Volunteers were intercepted on the 
way back, but after a scuffle succeeded in getting 
away with their guns. The soldiers on the return 
journey fired upon a provoking but unarmed crowd 

[174] 



in the streets of Dublin. The country had barely 
time to appreciate the contrast between Larne and 
Howth, when the sound of the German guns in 
Belgium broke upon its ears. 



[175] 



SINN FEIN, 1914-1916 

JoH.N MiTCHEL had prophesied that " in the event 
of a European war a strong national party could 
grasp the occasion," in Ireland, and Mitchel held 
too high a place in the estimation of Irish 
Nationalists for his words to have been forgotten 
or ignored. When Saurin (who, though an 
Orangeman and a Tory and, after the Union, one 
of the law officers of the Crown in Ireland, op- 
posed the policy of Castlereagh) uttered his 
famous dictum on the validity of the Act of Union, 
he provided Irish Nationalism with one of its most 
authoritative maxims: "You may make the 
Union binding as a law, but you cannot make it 
obligatory in conscience : it will be obeyed as 
long as England is strong, but resistance to it 
will be in the abstract a duty and the exhibition 
of that resistance will be a mere question of 
prudence." Irish Separatists did not always find 
it prudent to speak with the precision of the future 
Attorney-General : but the principle which he laid 
down was always understood to be one of which 
they acknowledged the validity. It had been 
repeated in language less classical, but equally 
emphatic, by Parnell and Mr. Redmond; but the 
occasion to put into practice the prudence of which 
[176] 



Saurln spoke had either never come or never been 
seized. But that it would come some day and in 
an unquestionable shape was a maxim of the 
Separatists. The increasing signs of antagonism 
between England and Germany had not since the 
beginning of the century escaped watchful eyes in 
Ireland. In the year 1900 The United Irishman 
in discussing German diplomacy had referred to 
the alliance between Irish and Germans in the 
United States which (it added) "is such a wel- 
come feature of contemporary politics." When, 
two years before the war, Mr. Churchill had 
referred in guarded language to the necessity to 
England of a " loyal Ireland " in the near future, 
Sinn Fein commented as follows on his words: 
" We have, for instance, no illusion whatever on 
the subject of Germany. If Germany victorious 
over England comes to Ireland, Germany will 
come to stay and rule the Atlantic from our shores. 
She will give us better terms than England offers. 
She will give us that Home Rule which all the 
States of the German Empire enjoy. . . . We 
have no doubt whatever that Ireland under Ger- 
man rule would be more prosperous than she 
has ever been under the rule of England. . . . 
The fact would not induce us to love Germany or 
to fight for a mere change of masters. But as a 
matter of bargaining we can say to Mr. Churchill, 
when he offers us a bogus Home Rule for aiding 
[177] 



British policy against Germany, that Ireland 
would get better terms from a successful Germany 
if she withheld that aid." This was the language 
of a journal which voiced the opinions of a party 
definitely committed against an Irish poHcy of 
force : the Republican Party, not so committed, 
used words less nebulous and guarded. In 191 1 
Irish Freedom printed a letter from John Devoy 
of New York, a prominent Irish-American and 
ex-Fenian, pointing out that a German war was 
coming in the near future, that England would 
need conscription before it was over, and that Ire- 
land must fight either for England or against 
her. A month or so later an editorial returned 
to the point: " Wolfe Tone, though he appealed 
to France for aid, did not ask Irishmen to sit idly 
by; and the arguments Tone advanced with con- 
siderable success to induce France to aid In 
establishing an Irish Republic can be applied to- 
day in the case of Germany." Later in the year 
an article entitled " When Germany fights Eng- 
land " discussed the policy of Ireland, having first 
stipulated for her complete independence, throw- 
ing her weight on the side of Germany in a war. 
Germany, it was thought, might play the same 
part as Tone had hoped that France would play 
in 1798 — might release Ireland from English 
domination and then declare her absolute inde- 
pendence. No doubt seems to have been enter- 

[178] 



tained that such a policy would be acceptable to 
Germany; for- In Germany the Separatists saw, not 
an ambitious empire grasping at world power, so 
much as a brave and efficient people trying to 
burst the bonds with which English policy and 
English intrigue had surrounded them. Sinn Fein 
had taken its official economic policy from* the 
German List, and pointed to its success in es- 
tablishing German industry upon a sure footing 
(in spite of the industrial rivalry of England) as 
an augury for Irish success and as a model for 
Irish effort. Germany was looked upon as the 
one European nation at once bold enough and 
strong enough to challenge English supremacy and 
vitally interested in challenging it effectively. 
For, with Ireland in the possession of England, 
the key to the Atlantic was in English hands: if 
Ireland were independent then the key would go 
to whatever hands framed the most favorable alli- 
ance with Ireland. 

But whatever the wisdom or the folly of such 
expectations, there is no doubt that the Separatists 
looked to Germany not to annex but to free Ire- 
land. They did not desire that Germany should 
take Ireland from England; but that Germany 
should declare Ireland to be an independent sover- 
eign State. Nothing less than this could have 
satisfied their aspirations. For Germany to have 
offered less would not have secured their assist- 
[179] 



ance; if Germany had annexed Ireland they would 
have welcomed a deliverer from Germany as 
eagerly as a deliverer was looked for then from 
the domination of England. 

But in the actual circumstances that accom- 
panied the outbreak of war in 1914 there was no 
disposition to take sides with Germany on the 
merits, or to stake everything upon the success of 
an understanding with Germany. It is true that 
the official statement of the English case for the 
declaration of war was received with a certain de- 
gree of quiet skepticism. The commercial rivalry 
of the two empires, the prophecies of a coming 
war that had been openly made for years, the 
Entente Cordiale with the French Republic, of the 
real meaning of which France at least made no 
secret, had been too well known and had been too 
openly and too long canvassed for the violation of 
Belgian neutrality by Germany to receive the im- 
portance which was attributed to it or to be re- 
garded as much more than a blunder adroitly 
utilized. There was not so much sympathy with 
Germany as a want of sympathy with England: 
there was not so much a lack of sympathy with 
Belgium as a distrust of the appeals which were 
insistently made to that feeling. 

When war was declared the Home Rule Bill 
had not passed into law. A great effort had been 
made to come to terms with the Ulster and the 
[180] 



English Tory Parties and had failed. It seemed 
as if the Government must either go forward with 
its policy and take the risks or own defeat. It 
was assumed as a matter of course that a foreign 
war ended ipso facto all disputes between the 
great English parties and that till the war should 
be over internal opposition to the Government 
should cease. But what about Ireland? Would 
the two Irish parties sink their differences in the 
same way in the interest of the Empire? Would 
the Irish people give their whole-hearted support 
and sympathy in the struggle to an England which 
had so far failed to satisfy what they regarded as 
their elementary rights? The choice fell to Mr. 
Redmond, On the one hand prudence counseled 
the use of a unique opportunity: he might offer 
Irish support in return for the immediate enact- 
ment of Home Rule and throw upon the Ulster 
Party the onus of refusing to support the Empire 
in its deadly struggle. He might on the other 
hand offer Irish support without conditions and 
leave the satisfaction of the national claims of 
Ireland as a debt of honor to the conscience of 
English statesmen. Had he bargained (and got 
his terms) Nationalist Ireland would have been 
with him almost to a man: with that simplicity of 
character, which, as the Greek historian says, 
" makes up a great part of good breeding," he 
promised without conditions : England might with- 
[i8i] 



draw her soldiers from Ireland; the shores of Ire- 
land, North and South, would be guarded by her 
armed sons. The House of Commons, England 
and the Empire were greatly impressed: the beau 
geste of the Irish leader was universally ap- 
plauded. The Home Rule Bill was presented for 
the Royal Signature and signed; a Suspensory 
Bill was hurried through providing that its opera- 
tion should be postponed; the Prime Minister 
promised the enemies of Home Rule that before it 
was allowed to be put into operation the Govern- 
ment would introduce and pass a Bill amending 
the measure in such a way as to make it acceptable 
to its opponents; and Mr. Redmond hurried home 
to rally Ireland to the cause of the Empire. The 
situation was summed up later with brutal frank- 
ness by a Belfast Unionist paper: " If the Na- 
tionalists will not enlist because war is just, they 
should not do so because they have got Home 
Rule ; because they have not got it. The Unionist 
Party has declared that when it comes into power 
it will not allow the Act to stand." Even so 
between 40,000 and 50,000 Irish Nationalists 
joined the Forces during the first year of the war. 
By the time Mr. Redmond had returned to Ire- 
land the attitude of all Irish parties to the war 
had become pretty clearly defined. The Ulster 
Volunteers, after about a month's hesitation on 
the part of their leaders, had received official inti- 
[182] 



mation that they were free to enlist. Any delay 
there may have been was due, not to the feeUngs 
of the rank and file, but to the tactics of the poli- 
ticians, eager to extract the last possible advan- 
tage from the situation. The bulk of the Na- 
tionalists, hke the bulk of the Ulstermen, were in 
sympathy with the cause of England and her Allies 
as against Germany and the two parties sent re- 
cruits in almost equal numbers. The attitude of 
Sinn Fein is put so clearly in a leader in its official 
organ that it deserves quotation: " Ireland is not 
at war with Germany: it has no quarrel with 
any Continental Power. . . . There is no Euro- 
pean Power waging war against the people of Ire- 
land: there are two European Powers at war with 
the people who dominate Ireland from Dublin 
Castle. . . . To-day the Irish are flattered and 
caressed by their libelers. England wants our 
aid and Mr. Redmond, true to his nature, rushes 
to offer it — for nothing. ... If England wins 
this war she will be more powerful than she has 
been at any time since 1864 and she will treat the 
Ireland which kissed the hand that smote her as 
such an Ireland ought to be treated. If she loses 
the war, and Ireland is foolish enough to identify 
itself with her, Ireland will deservedly share in 
her punishment. . . . We are Irish Nationalists 
and the only duty we have is to stand for Ireland's 
Interests, irrespective of the interests of England 
[183] 



or Germany or any foreign country. . . . Let 
It {i.e. the Government) withdraw the present 
abortive Home Rule Bill and pass ... a full 
measure of Home Rule and Irishmen will have 
some reason to mobilize for the defense of their 
institutions. At present they have none. In the 
alternative let a Provisional Government be set 
up in Dublin by Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward 
Carson and we shall give it allegiance. But the 
confidence trick has been too often played upon us 
to deceive us again. If the Irish Volunteers are 
to defend Ireland they must defend It for Ireland 
under Ireland's flag and under Irish ofllicers. 
Otherwise they will only help to perpetuate the 
enslavement of their country. . . . Germany is 
nothing to us in herself, but she is not our enemy. 
Our blood and our miseries are not upon her 
head. 

" But who can forbear admiration at the spec- 
tacle of the Germanic people whom England has 
ringed round with enemies standing alone, un- 
daunted and defiant against a world in arms?" 
This was a clear declaration of neutrality coupled 
with an offer of terms of friendship. But as the 
negotiations in Parliament proceeded, as it became 
clear that, while Home Rule was nominally to be 
passed, no effect was to be given to it for the 
present, and no permanent validity to attach to the 
passing of it, the tone of the Sinn Fein and Re- 
[184] 



publican Press grew harder. " If the Home 
Rule Bill," said Sinn Fein, " be signed, but not 
brought into immediate operation by the appoint- 
ment of a Home Rule Executive Government, 
Ireland is sold and betrayed. Let every Irishman 
get that into his head and keep it there." " We 
regard no enemy of England as an enemy of ours. 
... It was Grattan, the greatest of our constitu- 
tional leaders, who declared that if the interests 
of the Empire clashed with the liberties of Ireland, 
then he and every Irishman would say ' Live Ire- 
land — perish the Empire.'" Irish Freedom 
which printed in capitals across its pages mottoes 
such as " Germany is not Ireland's enemy," " Ire- 
land First, Last and All the Time," said, " If Eng- 
land withdraws her troops utterly from Ireland the 
Irish Volunteers will take and hold the country, 
hold it not alone against Germany but against 
anybody else who attempts to interfere with it. 
And on no other conditions will the Volunteers 
consent to move a step. . . . We are not pre- 
pared to buy even freedom — were it offered — 
at the price of our honor." It declared that " the 
psychological moment " had arrived for the union 
of Irishmen, for the attainment of Irish liberty, 
and proposed for the last time a working arrange- 
ment between the Irish Volunteers and the Ulster 
Volunteers to further the real liberties of Ireland. 
The Labor paper was even more outspoken. It 

[185] 



ridiculed the parliamentary leaders for their lack 
of ability in driving a bargain as compared with 
the more astute Ulstermen; it ridiculed the ad- 
vanced Nationalists who still talked nonsense 
about a junction of the two forces of Volunteers: 
it declared stoutly, " If England wants an Empire, 
let her hold the Empire. . . . Let no Irishman 
leave his own land. . . . Keep your guns for 
your real enemies." While it deplored the success 
of the recruiting campaign it allowed (with, con- 
sidering its own strongly expressed views, a com- 
mendable toleration) articles to appear from 
Labor men giving their reasons for supporting the 
war. But it had no illusions as to what was in 
store in the end for Irishmen who put its ideas 
into practice. " For some of us," James Con- 
nolly wrote, " the finish may be on the scaffold, 
for some in the prison cell, for others more for- 
tunate upon the battlefield of an Ireland in arms 
for a real republican liberty." But as a last 
resort even Connolly proposed terms of accommo- 
dation : he thought that the Volunteers by the bold 
policy of refusing to move until their terms were 
conceded might force the Government to repeal 
all clauses in the Home Rule Bill denying to Ire- 
land the self-government enjoyed by Canada and 
Australia. The last number of his paper bore the 
legend " We serve neither King nor Kaiser." It 
had been decided by all the pohtical parties that 
[i86] 



then seemed to count in Ireland that Irishmen 
must serve, if they served at all, not because they 
had been given Home Rule but because they had 
not been given it — because Ireland was still an 
integral part of the United Kingdom, bound to its 
fortunes till the issue of the war should be deter- 
mined. Three months after war was declared the 
Sinn Fein, Republican and Labor papers were 
suppressed by the police. 

The public discussion of the terms upon which 
it might have been possible to range even 
Separatists against Germany, the granting to Ire- 
land of something of her own to defend, being 
thus declared not to be in the public interest, it 
seemed as if no obstacle remained in the way of 
raising recruits all over the country. Irishmen 
were credited with a love of mingling in a fight 
without any nice discrimination as to the grounds 
of the quarrel or the merits of the dispute, " Is 
there not wars? " seemed to some of the authori- 
ties to be a sufficiently potent appeal. But it was 
found that there existed a confused and vague 
feehng that England as a whole had at last, in 
spirit of much English opposition, come to take a 
friendly view of the Irish claim to self-govern- 
ment; that, if the war had not occurred when it 
did, some way out of the difficulty would have 
been found; that the Government was honest in 
its intentions and could hardly be blamed for the 

[187] 



tactics of its opponents. Even a slight and doubt- 
ful indication of real friendliness on the part of 
England raises in Ireland a response which must 
often seem to be out of proportion to the cause 
which excited it; and at the beginning of the war 
Nationalist Ireland was ready to respond to the 
call for men in a way which roused the cynical 
criticism of the advanced wing of the Nationalist 
Party. " No English city," wrote the Irish 
Worker in September, 19 14, " is displaying more 
enthusiasm than Dublin in sending its bravest and 
best to murder men with whom they have no 
quarrel." The Scottish Borderers, leaving for 
the Front, received an enthusiastic send-off from 
the city in which a short while before they had had 
to be confined to barracks; all over the country 
men were flocking to recruit in the first few weeks 
of the war. Anti-English feeling was practically 
smothered in a wave of enthusiasm. The Irish 
Volunteers, now apparently under the assured 
control of the Parliamentary Party, became the 
subjects of an almost embarrassing interest. 
Unionist peers and gentry, retired militia ofiicers 
and other people, not (to say the least) distin- 
guished for Irish patriotism, hastened to enroll in 
their ranks and to proffer their services. The 
name of Major, the Earl of Fingall, appearing as 
Chief Inspecting OfHcer of the Irish Volunteers in 
Meath in an order signed by Colonel Maurice 
[188] 



Moore, " Inspector-General, Irish Volunteers," 
would have seemed strange six months before and 
stranger still a year afterwards. But it provoked 
little comment in August, 19 14. It seemed as if 
a miracle were about to happen and it became the 
apparent business of the authorities to take steps 
to secure that it should not happen. 

Enlistment had not been growing in popularity 
in Ireland for some years before the war. In 
1908, Sinn Fein had pointed out with satisfaction 
that the army returns showed that the number of 
Irishmen in the regular army had then fallen to the 
lowest point upon record. The Boer War and the 
anti-recruiting propaganda in Ireland had not been 
without their effect upon Irish feeling and the real 
position and work of the army in Ireland had been 
closely scrutinized. " The Curragh Mutiny " had 
provoked some very pointed comments upon the 
spirit which really animated the army in Ireland : 
it came to be looked upon as the citadel and symbol 
of all the forces that opposed the claims of Ireland. 
" We all know in our hearts," said Roger Case- 
ment and Eoin MacNeill in a manifesto published 
in April, 19 14, in the Irish Volunteer , " that the 
' Union ' means the military occupation of Ireland 
as a conquered country: that the real headquarters 
of Irish government on the Unionist principle is 
the Curragh Camp to which the offices of Dublin 
Castle are only a sort of vermiform appendix." 
[189] 



And the functions performed by the army in Ire- 
land would certainly have seemed strange to any 
one who felt any attachment to the views generally 
accepted in England as to the relation of the army 
to the civil power. In the General Orders for the 
guidance of the troops affording aid to the Civil 
Power in Ireland, issued in 1891, the following 
paragraph is to be found: "All officers in com- 
mand of corps or detachments are to transmit to 
the Deputy Adjutant General an immediate report 
of any outrages, large meetings held or expected 
to be held for political or other purposes, or occur- 
rences that may take place in the neighborhood 
of their posts connected with the state of the 
country, whether they have or have not been called 
upon to afford assistance to the civil power." The 
functions of an army acting upon instructions like 
these are hardly to be distinguished from those of 
an army of occupation, and Nationalist Ireland was 
well aware of the efficiency with which these func- 
tions were performed. To make enlistment 
popular in Ireland, even in a moment of 
enthusiasm, was thus a work requiring a certain 
amount of tact and discretion. 

The first real difficulty arose with the Volun- 
teers, whose services as an army of defense had 
been pledged by Mr. Redmond to the Government. 
The pledge had been given without the consent, 
or even the knowledge, of the Volunteer Com- 
[190] 



mittee and they resented the implication that they 
could be disposed of as If they were the private 
property of other people. They had been enrolled 
with a definite object and any duty for which their 
services were to be given must be shown to be at 
least not inconsistent with that object. The com- 
mittee, however, so far endorsed Mr. Redmond's 
offer as to pass a resolution declaring " the com- 
plete readiness of the Irish Volunteers to take 
joint action with the Ulster Volunteer Force for 
the defense of Ireland." The Prime Minister 
promised in Parliament that the Secretary for 
War would " do everything In his power, after 
consultation with gentlemen in Ireland, to arrange 
for the full equipment and organization of the 
Irish Volunteers." Whether the powers of the 
Secretary for War were less extensive than the 
Prime Minister believed, or whether the " gentle- 
men In Ireland " had other views, the scheme 
drawn up by General Sir Arthur Paget and his 
staff " by which the War Office may be supplied 
from the Irish Volunteers with a force for the 
defense of Ireland " was rejected by the War 
Office. This, It is true, made little difference In 
the end, for the Volunteer Committee, when the 
scheme was submitted to them, demanded the 
Inclusion of certain " primary conditions " which 
it was not at all likely that the War Office would 
have excepted: but the immediate rejection of it 

[191] 



by the military authorities in England is signifi- 
cant of the spirit in which the question of Irish 
recruiting was approached. It was hostile not 
only to Irish ideals but to Irish sentiment, to 
everything except the use to which Irish soldiers 
might be put. The contrast between the treat- 
ment accorded to Irish Nationalist recruits and the 
privileges granted to the Ulster Division can only 
be explained on the assumption that the War 
Office desired to show appreciation of the latter 
and suspicion of the former. The Ulster men 
were allowed to retain their own officers and their 
own tests of admission: the " regiments " formed 
under the Provisional Government of Ulster were 
taken over, without alteration, by the English 
authorities: they were allowed to refuse Catholics 
or Nationalists who offered to enlist in their 
ranks : their recruiting marches were accompanied 
by bands who played Orange party tunes through 
Catholic and Nationalist hamlets while they went 
through the farce of lecturing the inhabitants on 
their *' duty to the Empire in this crisis." In 
November, 19 14, an advertisement appeared in 
the Dublin Evening Mail announcing that a new 
Dublin Company of the Royal Irish Fusiliers was 
to be formed to which none but Unionists were 
admissible, intending recruits being directed to 
apply at the Orange Hall. The Ulster Force was 
[192] 



trained as a body in camps of its own, while Ulster 
Nationalists had to take train for the South or 
were shipped to England. Similar privileges 
were bluntly and persistently refused to the 
Nationalists. The Ulstermen had their own 
banners: the Nationalists might not fight under 
any emblem but the Union Jack, the symbol of 
the defeat of their nationality, of the very Act of 
Union against which they were known to be in 
protest. Treatment such as this could have only 
one result: the people who decided upon it must 
have known what the result would be, and by 
persisting in it showed that the result was desired. 
By cooling down the enthusiasm of Nationalist 
Ireland they made it possible to declare that 
Nationalist Ireland was " disappointing expecta- 
tions " and to hint that they had suspected all 
along that it was less eager to fight than had ap- 
peared. Incidentally the result was held to justify 
the suspicions which had brought It about. Irish 
soldiers were divided into two categories: those 
whom the authorities delighted to honor and 
those whom they decided to employ. It must be 
added that these manufactured animosities faded 
away In the stress of battle. Ulstermen and 
Nationalists fighting side by side covered them- 
selves with glory and did equal credit to the old 
land; and no more stringent criticisms of the 
[193] 



treacherous and malignant policy that divided 
them can be heard than from the lips of some of 
the men who survived the glorious ordeal of the 
Somme. 

But an influential body had from the first 
decided that the duty of Irishmen, and especially 
of Irish Volunteers, was to remain in Ireland; 
these were the members of the original Volunteer 
Committee and their adherents: outside the 
Volunteer ranks they were supported by Sinn 
Fein, the Republican Party and the Citizen Army. 
To them the supreme and immediate duty of Irish- 
men, and in a special degree of the Volunteers, 
wa.s to safeguard the liberties of Ireland — a duty 
to which the fact of a European war was irrele- 
vant, except in so far as It might afford an oppor- 
tunity to strengthen and secure Irish liberty. 
There is little doubt that some members of this 
party hoped that Germany would be victorious, 
not in the interests of Germany but In the Interests 
of Ireland, which had little prospect of winning 
concessions from an England rendered invincible 
by the overthrow of her most formidable rival: 
some of them regarded the war as a mere struggle 
for commercial supremacy in which Ireland had 
no interest at stake : but they would all alike have 
defended the shores of Ireland against a German 
army which invaded them for the purposes of 
annexation and conquest. To all alike the propo- 
[194] 



sition that Irishmen had any duty to enlist 
for foreign service in the English army was a 
denial of the very fundamental article of their 
creed. When Mr. Redmond, then, in his address 
to the Volunteers at Woodenbridge in September, 
19 14, urged them to enlist for service overseas the 
inevitable crisis was provoked. But the original 
provisional committee were now in a minority in 
the counsels of the organization they had founded, 
and they were hampered by a fundamental (and, 
indeed, intentional) ambiguity in the Volunteer 
pledge. " The rights and liberties common to all 
Irishmen " was not a phrase which carried its 
interpretation on its face. It was open to the 
Volunteer followers of Mr. Redmond to say that 
the democracy of Great Britain had conferred upon 
Ireland a " charter of liberty " and that it was the 
duty of Irishmen to fight for Great Britain, keep- 
ing faith with those who had kept faith with them. 
It was open to others to say that " the Thing on 
the Statute Book " fell far short of conferring 
upon Irishmen the rights and liberties to which 
they were entitled, and that the duty to secure 
first that to which they were entitled precluded 
them from the prior performance of any other 
task. The members of the original committee 
who took the latter view could also urge that Mr. 
Redmond's original pledge that the Volunteers 
would " defend the shores of Ireland " was not 

[195] 



capable of the gloss that " the shores of Ireland " 
under the circumstances was a legitimate figure of 
speech for the trenches in the front line in France. 
The difference of interpretation developed into a 
split. The members of the original committee 
met in September and called a Volunteer Conven- 
tion for November 25, 19 14, at which it was de- 
cided " to declare that Ireland cannot with honor 
or safety take part in foreign quarrels otherwise 
than through the free action of a National Gov- 
ernment of her own; and to repudiate the claim of 
any man to offer up the blood and lives of the sons 
of Irishmen and Irishwomen to the services of the 
British Empire while no National Government 
which could act and speak for the people of Ire- 
land is allowed to exist." 

Before the split the Volunteers had numbered 
about 150,000; and it would appear that the great 
majority of these at first sided with Mr. Redmond. 
Many of them enlisted: many of them, under the 
title of the National Volunteers, continued to exist 
as a separate body in Ireland: some at least of 
them afterwards found their way back into the 
ranks of the Irish Volunteers. 

From the time of the Volunteer split the air 
was cleared politically in Ireland : for the first time 
people began to know precisely where they stood. 
The National Volunteers and the Parliamentary 
Party under Mr. Redmond's leadership were com- 
[196] 



mitted, as were the Unionists, to the unreserved 
and energetic prosecution of the war: all the other 
parties, Sinn Fein, the Republicans, the Irish 
Volunteers, and the Citizen Army adopted an 
attitude of watchful neutrality. Their view was 
bounded by the shores of Ireland or when they cast 
a glance abroad it was as the husbandman observes 
the clouds. They continued to differ (sometimes 
sharply and vehemently) from one another: but 
the public, with a prophetic disregard of the mere 
obvious present, began to label them indiscrimi- 
nately as Sinn Feiners. In truth common adver- 
sity was drawing them closer together, and the ap- 
parently heterogeneous elements which went to 
make up the Sinn Fein of present-day Ireland 
were being welded into a unity of aim and 
resolution. 

The results were soon apparent. During the 
month or so when the Volunteers enjoyed the 
fleeting sunlight of aristocratic favor, the Foreign 
Office had written (i8th August, 1914) to H.B.M. 
Council-General at Antwerp to assist Mr. John 
O'Connor, M.P., and Mr. H. J. Harris In arrang- 
ing for the shipment to Ireland of certain rifles 
belonging to the Volunteers, permission to export 
them having been obtained from the Belgian 
Government by the Foreign Office. It was, no 
doubt, an oversight that no ammunition for them 
was obtained, or could be obtained afterwards; but 
[197] 



the rifles came. Three months later an officer of 
the Volunteers who was employed in the Ordnance 
Survey was dismissed without charge or notice and 
ordered to leave Dublin within twenty-four hours. 
He was only the first of a series of Volunteer 
organizers who suffered deportation under similar 
circumstances. The Birmingham factory which 
was engaged in making guns for the Volunteers 
was raided, its books and correspondence seized, 
and it was ordered not to remove any goods from 
its premises. To be an Irish Volunteer was to be 
" disaffected," and to be " disaffected " was to be 
liable to summary measures of repression. 

The autumn of 19 14 saw the appearance of a 
new Separatist paper, Eire-Ireland, which ap- 
peared as a weekly on October 26th and was 
changed to a daily after the second number. It is 
significant of the change in Irish feeling that it was 
now possible to run a Separatist daily paper in 
Dublin, and of the gradual rapprochement between 
Irish parties that this paper, intended as the organ 
of the Irish Volunteers, was edited by Mr. Arthur 
Griffith, the rounder of the Sinn Fein movement. 
Its attitude towards the war was defined in an 
article by Roger Casement in the first number: 
" Ireland has no quarrel with the German people 
or just cause of offense against them. . . . Ire- 
land has suffered at the hands of British adminis- 
trators a more prolonged series of evils deliber- 
[198] 



ately inflicted than any other community of civi- 
lized men." It emphasized the view of the 
Volunteers that Mr. Redmond's advice to take 
their place in the firing line was out of harmony 
with their principles. " The Irish Volunteers had 
from the beginning and still have but a single duty 
— to secure and safeguard the rights and liberties 
of Ireland." The new daily continued a column 
" The War Day by Day " in which a critical 
analysis of the military situation was attempted. 
While most of the other Irish papers merely repro- 
duced the amateur war criticisms of Fleet Street, 
the editor of Eire, assuming that English news- 
papers were giving only one side of the case, 
attempted an independent study of the situation, 
which was made to appear much less favorable 
to the Allies than was asserted by other Irish 
papers. Stories of German atrocities were 
analyzed and ridiculed. The fortunes of the Irish 
regiments were followed with a jealous eye: it was 
asserted that they were being sacrificed unneces- 
sarily while English regiments were spared, and 
the Government was challenged to prepare and 
publish complete casualty lists for the Irish regi- 
ments of the line. The protest of the German 
professors against the alleged Allied calumnies was 
printed in full and annotated with sympathy. 
The assurance given to Roger Casement by the 
German Acting-Secretary of State for Foreign 

[199] 



Affairs as to the contemplated action of German 
troops if they should land in Ireland was printed 
as a document of first-rate international import- 
ance. It was assumed that the Ballot Act would 
be enforced in Ireland and passive resistance to its 
enforcement was urged from the first number of 
the paper. Eire did not run for much more than 
six weeks. Its last number (December 4) was a 
broad sheet announcing that the printer, whose 
premises had been entered by a military force 
which had confiscated his property, felt unable to 
continue the printing of the paper. 

Eire did not so much make, as voice, the 
opinions of a considerable section of Irish 
Nationalist opinion. The newspapers were 
scanned eagerly every morning all over Ireland 
for tidings of the Irish regiments. It was known 
that they were engaged, that they were outnum- 
bered, that they would fight like lions ("the 
Gaels went out to battle but they always fell ") : 
a disquieting and ominous silence reigned as to 
their fate. It was assumed that the news was bad 
and that it was being kept back; it began to be 
asserted that they were being put upon forlorn 
hopes to spare the more valued EngHsh regiments : 
and even those who did not credit the suspicion 
felt uneasy when it was expressed. It may have 
been necessary to refrain from telling the whole 
truth in official reports, but eyery course has its 
[200] 



disadvantages and^ so far as Ireland was con- 
cerned, this had the result of arousing suspicion 
and distrust. And to the question " Why, if these 
men can fight and die for the freedom of others, 
are they not considered worthy of the freedom 
they desire for themselves? " the answers did not 
carry conviction. 

The official " War News " printed in the Irish 
papers was read with detachment and reserve; 
stories of German atrocities were received with 
unimpressionable skepticism. This was not due to 
any pro-German bias, or to any Sinn Fein propa- 
ganda. Peasants in remote villages who never 
saw any paper but an odd copy of the Freeman's 
Journal or the Irish Daily Independent, and who 
were Redmondites to a man, discussed these 
matters with a completely open mind, and with 
(to those who did not know them) surprising 
acumen. People accustomed for years to read 
that their country or their province, in which some 
unpopular grazier had been boycotted, was " seeth- 
ing with outrage and disorder," to be told that a 
district in which there was known not to be as 
much crime in a year as there was in an English dis- 
trict of the same size every month was " in a state 
bordering on almost complete lawlessness," were 
not moved when the Germans were charged on the 
same authority with crimesi against civiHzation. 
The word of " our English correspondent " was 
[201] 



simply " not evidence " against anybody. This 
invincible skepticism, born of experience, was quite 
wrongly interpreted as being the result of " pro- 
German " sympathies when it proved an unex- 
pected obstacle to the recruiting campaign. 

The gradual growth of Sinn Fein and anti- 
English (which was only accidentally and not on 
principle pro-German) sentiment during the war, 
and the increasing difficulties found in the way of 
the recruiting campaign, were due mainly to a 
growing disbelief in the sincerity of English 
statesmen in their dealings with Ireland. The 
Government had gone too far in the direction of 
Home Rule to make Unionists sure that the 
promised Amending Bill would secure that they 
should not be " coerced " : it had not gone far 
enough to make Nationalists sure that it really 
meant to do what it had promised. The result 
was the conviction upon all hands that their rights 
must be secured by their own efforts not by 
reliance upon the lukewarm sympathy of others. 
This conviction was not a matter of a sudden 
growth nor did it always find expression in the 
same way: it acted at once in favor of, and to the 
detriment of, recruiting: it was professed both by 
Nationalists and by Unionists. At first recruits 
joined because the war was just, because the 
Empire was in danger, because England had 
granted Ireland a *' charter of liberty," because 
[202] 



the civilization of Europe was threatened, because 
there was fighting afoot. Probably the majority 
enlisted for one or other of these reasons. But 
the theory of " a free gift of a free people " 
expounded by Mr. Asquith in Dublin fell more and 
more into the background. It began to be repre- 
sented on both sides that the more recruits either 
party sent to the war the stronger would be the 
lien of that party upon the sympathy of the Eng- 
lish Government. Unionists whose blood had 
flowed for England in Flanders could not be 
abandoned after such a sacrifice: Nationalists 
who had given their best and bravest to the cause 
of freedom could not be denied the freedom for 
which such a price had been paid. The official 
recruiting campaign wavered in Its appeal between 
the two points. Its minor Ineptitudes need hardly 
be taken into account. It was hardly politic to 
cover the walls of police barracks In Protestant 
villages in Ulster with green placards drawing 
attention to a few weighty words of Cardinal 
Logue: these follies did neither harm nor good. 
But It was different when appeals to the chivalry 
and bravery of Irishmen alternated with deduc- 
tions from the famous phrase about *' the rights of 
small nations." When Irish Nationalists were 
implored to rally to the defense of the Friend of 
Little Nations the size of Ireland was not likely to 
be forgotten. The inference that In fighting for 
[203] 



the liberties of small nations Irishmen would be 
helping their own nation to secure the same liberty 
was the inference intended: but it was not always 
the inference actually drawn. The person who 
first conceived the idea of making use of that 
phrase for recruiting purposes in Ireland did the 
cause of recruiting an unforeseen but serious dis- 
service. Was it, after all, really true (it was 
asked) that England could not recognize the free- 
dom of Ireland until Ireland had first helped 
England to force Germany to recognize the free- 
dom of Belgium? Was the freedom of Ireland 
then not a matter of right but the result of a 
bargain — the equivalent of how many fighting 
men? Had England been the friend of small 
nations before the war, was she to be their friend 
during the war, or was Ireland only to help her 
to be their friend after the war was over? The 
right of Ireland to more freedom than she had 
enjoyed had seemed to be recognized before the 
war had been spoken of; what had become of the 
recognition of it? And even bargaining, how- 
ever distasteful, has its usages : it was no bargain 
when one side was called upon to pay up and the 
other carefully refrained from promising anything 
definite in return. 

The bulk of the recruits enlisted during the 
first year of the war, and enlisted for worthy and 
honorable motives: when recruiting became, as 
[204] 



it did become later, a question of party tactics the 
results were less favorable. But quite early in 
the war it became plain that there was going 
to be a contest between the two Irish parties as to 
which should have most to show for itself at the 
end, and there was no burning desire to assist 
political opponents to obtain recruits. Sir Ed- 
ward Carson refused absolutely to stand on the 
same recruiting platform as Mr. Redmond; the 
Belfast Unionist papers found it a brave lapse 
from principle in the present Lord Chancellor of 
England that he addressed a recruiting meeting in 
Liverpool in the company of Home Rulers. The 
Ulster Volunteer Force was informed practically 
that it had a two-fold duty, to fight for the Empire 
abroad, and to keep up the organization at home. 
It was plain from the first that in Ireland there 
was to be no " party truce," and it was recognized 
on all hands before long that when the war was 
over the old fight was to be renewed. The posi- 
tion of the Home Rule Act, penned in the Statute 
Book, with an Amending Bill waiting to tear it to 
pieces when the time came for it to be allowed out, 
made this inevitable. And the Government did 
not find it in its heart to- hold an even balance 
between the parties : and when the balance began 
to dip the end was in sight for those who had eyes 
to see. 

The only party really able to turn to account the 
[205] 



situation thus created was the Sinn) Fein party. 
It had preached for years that the EngUsh govern- 
ing classes, indeed the Enghsh nation, were not, 
in spite of their apparent readiness to listen to the 
Parliamentary Party, the friends of Irish 
Nationahsm in any real sense : that they had no 
intention (and never had) of satisfying the just 
claims of Ireland: that the Parliamentarians were 
mere pawns in a party game, to be sacrificed when 
it suited both or either of the English parties : that 
the word of English statesmen could not be trusted, 
and that Ireland had nothing to gain from them: 
that self-reliance, vigilance and distrust of Eng- 
land were " the sinews of good sense " in Irish 
politics. It had hinted, not obscurely, that the 
opportunity of Ireland would come when England 
should be involved in a European war, and that 
Ireland must be prepared when the day came to 
use the opportunity. It now pointed a trium- 
phant finger to what was going on in Ireland and 
asked which had been the truer prophet, itself or 
the Parliamentary Party. It quoted the returns 
of recruiting in Ulster in support of its thesis: 
" The fact that out of 200,000 Unionists of mili- 
tary age in Ireland — men who talked Empire, 
sang Empire and protested they would die for the 
British Empire — four out of every five are still 
at home, declaring they will not have Home Rule, 
is proof that the Irish Unionist knows his present 
[206] 



business." That Irish soldiers were to be used 
to further English interests, and not the cause of 
Ireland, was (it held) proved by extracts from 
English newspapers, where in unguarded moments 
the naked truth peeped out: it gave prominence 
to a quotation from the Liverpool Post of Sep- 
tember 12, 1914: "His Majesty could make a 
triumphal tour of Ireland, North, South, East 
and West, and in reply to his personal appeal, 
there would be 300,000 Irishmen of all creeds and 
classes for the Front in less than a week. In Eng- 
land the question becomes more and more impor- 
tant in the interests of the efficiency of our trade, 
whether we can spare any more skilled mechanics 
for the ranks of battle. The capture of the Ger- 
man trade is almost as vital to the existence of the 
Empire as the destruction of Prussian militarism." 
By the end of 19 14 all avowedly Sinn Fein 
papers had been suppressed, and the two Ameri- 
can papers, the Gaelic American and the Irish 
JVorld, had been prohibited in Ireland. The lat- 
ter had been a supporter of Mr. Redmond's pol- 
icy but had parted company with him on the ques- 
tion of recruiting in Ireland. The editor of Sinn 
Fein countered the suppression of his paper by an 
ingenious device. He began to publish a bi- 
weekly called Scissors and Paste, which contained 
nothing but extracts from other Enghsh, Irish, 
Colonial and American papers. It was intro- 
[207] 



duced to the reader in the only editorial it con- 
tained, entitled "Ourselves": "It is high 
treason," it ran, " for an Irishman to argue with 
the sword the right of his small nationality to 
equal political freedom with Belgium or Servia or 
Hungary. It is destruction to the property of his 
printer now when he argues it with the pen. 
Hence while England is fighting the battle of the 
Small Nationalities, Ireland is reduced to Scissors 
and Paste. Up to the present the sale and use of 
these instruments have not been prohibited by the 
British Government in Ireland." The columns of 
the Times y the Daily Mail, and the Morning Post 
supplied the German Wireless messages: the New 
York Times was drawn upon for James O'Donnell 
Bennett's articles protesting against the reports of 
German atrocities. In addition It printed suitable 
extracts from The Reliqiies of Father Prout, from 
Barry's Songs of Ireland, Thomas Davis's Essays. 
and Sir Samuel Ferguson: it reprinted Curran's 
speech In defense of the printer of The Press in 
1797. It ransacked the Daily Mail for that jour- 
nal's vigorous denunciations of the French in 
1 899 : " If they cannot cease their insults their col- 
onies will be taken from them and given to Ger- 
many and Italy — we ourselves want nothing 
more. . . . France will be rolled in the blood and 
mud in which her Press daily wallows." The 
paper ran for a little over a month. Its undoing 
[208] 



was an extract from the Irish Times, a copy of a 
notice posted on Sunday morning in January, 

19 1 5, in places near a number of Roman Catholic 
churches in Wexford: "People of Wexford, 
take no notice of the police order to destroy your 
own property and leave your own homes if a Ger- 
man army lands in Ireland. When the Germans 
come they will come as friends and to put an end 
to English rule in Ireland. Therefore stay in your 
homes and assist as far as possible the German 
troops. Any stores, hay, corn or forage taken 
by the Germans will be paid for by them." 

Just before the disappearance of Scissors and 
Paste, the Irish Worker, three weeks after its 
suppression, appeared again in Glasgow, where it 
was printed by the Socialist Labor Party, and 
began to circulate once more in Ireland. 

After five months Mr. Arthur Griffith was 
again able to start a paper. The Dublin printers 
could not be induced to take the risk of printing 
for him again: but Belfast supplied one with 
the necessary enterprise. On June 19, 19 15, 
Nationality appeared as a penny weekly paper and 
continued to appear until the Easter Rising in 

19 1 6. In tone Nationality was a reproduction of 
its predecessors and as the main characteristic of 
Sinn Fein propaganda was its directness and 
simplicity two extracts from its columns will suf- 
fice. An editorial (signed C.) on "The Fenian 

[209] 



Faith " written towards the end of 19 15 contains 
the following: "The Fenians and the Fenian 
faith incarnated in Allen, Larkin and O'Brien 
were of a fighting and revolutionary epoch. They 
can only be commemorated by men of another 
fighting and revolutionary generation. That 
generation we have with us to-day. For we have 
the material, the men and staff of war, the faith 
and purpose and* cause for revolution. . . . We 
shall have Ireland illumined with a light before 
which even the Martyrs will pale: the light of 
Freedom, of a deed done and action taken and a 
blow struck for the Old Land " ; and a month or 
so later : " The things that count in Ireland against 
English conscription are national determination, 
serviceable weapons and the knowledge of how to 
use them." Under the stress of circumstances 
Sinn Fein seemed to have abandoned the policy 
of the days of peace and to have come round in 
time of war to the policy which, even two years be- 
fore the war, had been enunciated in Irish Free- 
dom: " Ireland can be freed by force of arms; 
that is the fact which ever must be borne in mind. 
The responsibility rests with the men of this gen- 
eration. They can strike with infinitely greater 
hopes of success than could their fathers and their 
grandsires: but if they let this chance slip ... if 
they strike no blow for their country whilst Eng- 
land herself is in handgrips with the most power- 
[210] 



ful nation in Europe, then the opportunity will 
have passed and Ireland will be more utterly under 
the heel of England than ever she was since the 
Union." This was written in September, 19 12. 
But the task of putting the policy into practice, of 
welding the (at times) discordant elements of 
anti-Parhamentarian Nationalism together and 
making possible a united effort was reserved for 
other hands and another mind than those of the 
founder of Sinn Fein. 

During the vigorous years of its youth Sinn 
Fein had not confined its propagandist activities 
to public meetings, the foundation of branches and 
the publication of a paper. The National Council 
of Sinn Fein had issued a series of " National 
Council Pamphlets " dealing with those aspects of 
Sinn Fein policy upon which the public seemed to 
require instruction. The first of these was a 
general exposition of the Sinn Fein policy by Mr. 
Griffith. Others were " The Purchase of the 
Railways," " England's Colossal Robbery of 
Ireland," a study of the financial relations between 
the two countries since the Act of Union, " Ire- 
land and the British Armed Forces." " Constitu- 
tionalism and Sinn Fein " and " How Ireland is 
Taxed," an exposition of the fact (often ignored) 
that under the Union Ireland is the most heavily 
taxed country in Europe. Finally, in 19 12, a 
pamphlet by Mr. Griffith, " The Home Rule Bill 
[211] 



Examined," was a general review of the powers 
conferred and withheld by the Home Rule Bill and 
an examination of the real bearing of that measure 
upon the political and economic situation of Ire- 
land. The increasing difficulties which attended 
the publication of a newspaper during the war, the 
increased demand for information upon the situa- 
tion created by it, the increasing number of those 
who felt that they had something to say which 
required more space than could be afforded in a 
newspaper, led to a revival of the publication of 
pamphlets. Early in 19 15 a series of "Tracts 
for the Times " was projected by the Irish Public- 
ity League. The first of these was a tract 
" What Emmet means in 19 15," significant of the 
direction in which minds were turning at the time. 
It was followed by " Shall Ireland be Divided? " 
an impassioned protest against the policy of par- 
tition and by " The Secret History of the Irish 
Volunteers " (which ran through several editions) , 
an account by The O'Rahilly of the formation of 
the Volunteers, their policy, their attempts to se- 
cure arms and their relations with the Parliamen- 
tary Party. The traditional Sinn Fein view was 
enforced in " When the Government Publishes 
Sedition," an analysis of the official census 
returns, showing that under the Union the 
population of Ireland had been reduced by one- 
half, and in two pamphlets on " Daniel O'Connell 
[212] 



and Sinn Fein " an attempt was made to commend 
the policy by an argument that O'Connell both in 
his methods and his aims was really a Sinn 
Felner, and by an exposition (" How Ireland is 
Plundered ") of the question of the Financial 
Relations in O'Connell's day and since. Other 
pamphlets were " What it Feels Like " on the 
prison experiences of the writer who had been 
imprisoned under the Defense of the Realm Act 
for his political activities, " Ascendancy While 
You Wait " and " Why the Martyrs of Man- 
chester Died." During the same time the 
Cumann na mBan, the women's branch of the 
Irish Volunteers, added to their activities the pub- 
lication of a " National Series " of pamphlets 
" Why Ireland is Poor — English Laws and Irish 
Industries," " Dean Swift on the Situation " and 
" The Spanish War," a reprint of a pamphlet pub- 
lished in 1790 by Wolfe Tone, urging the Irish 
Parliament to take into account in the considera- 
tion of the threatened war with Spain solely and 
simply the interests of Ireland, the only interests 
which it should allow itself to consider. The 
Committee of Public Safety also in 19 15 published 
a pamphlet on " The Defense of the Realm Act 
in Ireland " showing how the Act was adminis- 
tered for the suppression of Nationalist propa- 
ganda. The speech which Mr. F, Sheehy-Skeffing- 
ton delivered in the dock when charged under the 
[213] 



same Act with interfering with recruiting was 
published as a pamphlet about the same time. 
The articles contributed to Irish Freedom by 
P. H. Pearse were reprinted under the title of 
" From a Hermitage " in the autumn of 1915 as 
one of the " Bodenstown Series " of pamphlets, 
the first of which had been Mr. Pearse's " How 
Does She Stand?" a reprint of two speeches de- 
livered in America in 19 14 at Emmet Commemora- 
tions in New York and Brooklyn and of the elo- 
quent speech delivered at the grave of Wolfe 
Tone in Bodenstown Churchyard in 19 13. The 
funeral of O'Donovan Rossa in August, 19 15, 
also produced some pamphlets on Rossa's life and 
his significance as a Fenian leader and a protagonist 
of the Irish Republican cause. These pamphlets, 
and others, had a wide circulation; they were 
eagerly discussed, especially among young Na- 
tionahsts; they widened the rift between the Parlia- 
mentary Party and their opponents, and had much 
to do with the shaping of Irish Nationalist opinion. 
Meanwhile the activities of the Irish Volunteers 
continued. The secession after the dispute with 
Mr. Redmond had withdrawn a large majority of 
their original numbers: indeed some authorities 
go so far as to say that immediately after the for- 
mation of the National Volunteers, the original 
committee could not count upon a following of 
more than 10,000 or 12,000 men. Be this as it 
[214] 



may, the arrest and deportation of several of their 
organizers, the constant supervision over their 
proceedings exercised by the police authorities and 
the sure drift of Nationalist opinion away from the 
Parliamentarians and their policy, not (it is true) 
so marked then as to cause serious official mis- 
giving, tended to increase their prestige and 
popularity. The funds had for the most part gone 
with the National Volunteers, but the Irish in 
America, who sided not with Mr. Redmond but 
with the Irish Volunteers, supplied large sums of 
money for equipment and organization. The 
report of the Second Annual Convention held in 
November, 19 15, contains a speech by the Presi- 
dent on the history and aims of the movement 
which concluded: " Further I will only say that 
we ought all to adhere faithfully and strictly to 
the objects, the constitution and the policy which 
we have adopted. We will not be diverted from 
our work by tactics of provocation. We will not 
give way to irritation or excitement. Our busi- 
ness is not to make a show or indulge in demon- 
strations. We started out on a course of con- 
structive work requiring a long period of patient 
and tenacious exertion. When things were going 
most easily for us, I never shrank from telling my 
comrades that success might require years of steady 
perseverance — a prospect sometimes harder 
to face than an enemy in the field. . . . Great 

[^15] 



progress has been juade, more must be made. The 
one thing we must look to is that there shall be no 
stopping and no turning back." There were at 
this time over 200 corps of the Irish Volunteers in 
active training and the movement was spreading, 
if not rapidly, yet quietly and surely. The leaders 
waited for time to do its work, to bring fully 
home to Irish Nationalists the difference between 
a policy in which the necessities of Empire held 
the first place and one in which the claims of Ire- 
land were supreme: meanwhile it was intended 
that the Volunteers should act as " a national 
defense force for Ireland, for all Ireland and 
for Ireland only," ready to ward off any assault 
upon Irish liberty, but resolved not to provoke or 
to invite attack. 

But in spite of official policies and intentions 
there had slowly been formed a small but deter- 
mined minority in Ireland who looked to revolu- 
tion as the only sure and manly policy for a nation 
pledged to freedom. This, the creed of the 
Fenians, had not been openly avowed in Ireland 
for almost half a century : Nationalists had come 
to regard it either as a forlorn hope, a gallant but 
hopeless adventure, or as a policy out of harmony 
with modern civilization and progress. Here and 
there a lonely but picturesque figure might be 
seen, " an old Fenian," in the world but not of it, 
who spoke with a resigned contempt of the new 
[216] 



men and the new methods, an Inspiration but 
hardly an example to the younger generation. 
There was still in existence the Irish Republican 
Brotherhood, an obscure and elusive body, mys- 
terious as the Rosicrucians and to all outward 
appearances of hardly any more political impor- 
tance. A secret but apparently innocuous corre- 
spondence was understood to be kept up by them 
with America where, among an important and 
influential section of the expatriated Irish, the 
hope was more widely and more openly cherished 
of a day when Ireland would shake off the lethargy 
of a generation and revert to the age-long claim for 
independence. For a short time it seemed as if 
the prospect of the grant of Home Rule would 
quench the last embers of the revolutionary fire, 
as if the English democracy had at last stretched 
out a friendly hand and that the rest would be the 
work of time. Ulster's appeal to arms quickened 
the embers to a flame; in less than two years' time 
a revolution was spoken of more openly than had 
been the case for fifty years. No man in Ireland 
would have taken up arms to secure Home Rule: 
it was a " concession " which to some Nationalists 
seemed the greatest that could be obtained, to 
others (and perhaps the majority) to be a step 
upon the road to a larger independence : both 
sections were agreed that it should be sought by 
constitutional methods. But force might be the 
[217] 



only means of retaining what it had been proper 
to secure without it, and the Irish Volunteers were 
prepared to fight those who attempted to take 
from the people of Ireland any right which they 
had been able to secure. 

But it was not to be expected that the purely 
defensive policy of the Volunteers would commend 
itself to all sections of Nationalist opinion nor 
could the formula of their association produce 
more than an outward and seeming unity. So 
much had been true before the war; and when 
Europe was involved in strife, when the issue be- 
tween England with her Allies and the Central 
Powers seemed to hang in the balance, a purely de- 
fensive and waiting policy seemed to be a criminal 
neglect of the opportunity offered by Providence. 
Mitchel's prophecy of the fortune that a conti- 
nental war might bring to Ireland seemed about to 
be fulfilled, unless the arm of Ireland should prove 
nerveless and impotent. Not alone in Ireland 
were voices raised to point the lesson: the Irish in 
America who still professed the Fenian faith urged 
insistently the use of the opportunity. The books 
written by James K. Maguire and printed by the 
Wolfe Tone Publishing Co. of New York, " What 
Could Germany do for Ireland ? " and " The King, 
the Kaiser and Irish Freedom " had a considerable 
circulation in Ireland during 19 15 and 19 16. 
Written by an Irish-American who had been 
[218] 



educated at a German school in Syracuse, and was 
well known for his German sympathies, they 
boldly announced that in a German victory lay the 
only hope for the establishment of an Irish 
Republic. They asserted not only that Germany 
would establish and guarantee the independence 
of Ireland, but that she would help Ireland to 
develop her industries and commerce, her resources 
in coal, metals and peat, which still after a 
hundred years of the Union were no further 
developed than they had been in the middle of the 
eighteenth century. To most Irishmen the pane- 
gyric of German disinterestedness was an idle tale, 
and Sinn Fein had been proclaiming (not without 
success) for nearly a score of years that the 
development of Ireland must not be expected from 
outsiders but from Irishmen themselves. But 
there were those who thought that the power to 
raise the heavy hand of England must be found, 
not in the slow efforts of a painful and hampered 
self-reliance, but in a hand heavier still : and It 
was assumed that German aid once given to free 
and reestablish Ireland would be withdrawn be- 
fore it became tutelage and exploitation. No one 
dreamed of an Ireland that should exchange the 
penurious restraint of the Union for the pros- 
perous servitude of a German Province: the end 
of all endeavor was the sovereign independence of 
Ireland. 

I219] 



The German Foreign Office, with the sanction 
of the Imperial Chancellor, made quite early in the 
war, in the motion of Roger Casement, gives 
what was taken for an unequivocal assurance on 
this point. " The Imperial Government," the 
statement ran, " declares formally that Germany 
would not invade Ireland with any Intentions of 
conquest or of the destruction of any institutions. 
If, in the course of this war, which Germany did 
not seek, the fortunes of arms should ever bring 
German troops to the coast of Ireland, they would 
land there, not as an army of invaders coming to 
rob or destroy, but as the fighting forces of a 
Government inspired by goodwill toward a land 
and a people for whom Germany only wishes 
national prosperity and national freedom." Even 
a slight acquaintance with methods of imperial 
expansion would point to the necessity for a 
rigorous scrutiny of the terms of such a declara- 
tion and no such scrutiny would pronounce this 
declaration to be even moderately satisfactory: 
even if it stood the test it would not (so mysterious 
are the ways of State policy) have been worth the 
paper it was written on. But " cows over the 
water have long horns " — the German promise 
was an anchor sure and steadfast. 

Whatever aid might be expected from Germany 
to secure the success of a revolution, nothing could 
be done without a party in Ireland united in its 
[220] 



aims and able to take advantage of any aid that 
might be sent. No single party in Ireland could 
have been said to fulfill the conditions. The only 
Nationalist section which could have combined 
with an outside expeditionary force landing in 
Ireland was the Irish Volunteers, but not one of 
them was, by virtue of his Volunteer pledge, in 
any way bound to do so. Nor was there any 
guarantee that their views as to the ultimate form 
which a free Irish constitution should assume were 
identical: in fact it was known that they were not. 
Official Sinn Fein still found the independence of 
Ireland in the Constitution of 1782: the Repub- 
licans would have nothing but a " true Republican 
Freedom." The Citizen Army was Republican 
in its teaching but it was openly hostile to both 
sections of the Volunteers. To it Sinn Fein and 
many of the Republicans seemed a bourgeois party, 
from which the workers need expect nothing. To 
James Connolly, their leader, the vaunted pros- 
perity reached under the independent Irish Parlia- 
ment was the prosperity of a class and not of the 
community, and he could point to the writings of 
Arthur O'Connor, ignored by orthodox Sinn 
Feiners, in proof of his contention. To establish 
the pohtical ideals of Sinn Fein the Citizen Army 
was not prepared to raise its little finger. The 
Republicans might have seemed more sympathetic 
and congenial allies; but many even of them 
[221] 



seemed too remote and formal in their ideals, too 
much wrapped up in visions of a future Ireland, 
free and indivisible, to have time to spare for the 
formulation of the means by which all Irishmen 
might really be free. But there were not wanting 
men on both sides who saw the necessity of union 
in the face of a common danger for the furtherance 
of -a common purpose, who taught that if Labor 
should pledge itself to Ireland, Ireland should also 
pledge itself to Labor. This union when it came 
about was mainly due to Connolly and P. Pearse. 
James Connolly had been for several years the 
acknowledged leader of Irish Socialism. His 
book on Labor in Irish History written in 1 910 is 
recognized as a standard work: his Reconquest of 
Ireland, his pamphlet The New Evangel, and his 
articles in The Irish Worker were widely read and 
had great influence among Irish Nationalists who 
belonged to the Labor movement. His attitude 
to the two main Irish parties was one of hostility: 
he was hostile to the Unionists as representing the 
party of tyranny and privilege, to the Home 
Rulers as the followers of a policy which was " but 
a cloak for the designs of the middle-class desirous 
of making terms with the Imperial Government it 
pretends to dislike." To ardent and vague talk 
about " Ireland " and " freedom " he opposed the 
cool and critical temper of one who was accus- 
tomed to loo'k stern facts in the face: " Ireland as 
[222] 



distinct from her people," he wrote, " is nothing 
to me ; and the man who is bubbling over with love 
and enthusiasm for ' Ireland,' and can yet pass 
unmoved through our streets and witness all the 
wrong and the suffering, the shame and the degra- 
dation brought upon the people of Ireland — aye, 
brought by Irishmen upon Irish men and women 
— without burning to end it, is in my opinion a 
fraud and a liar in his heart, no matter how he 
loves that combination of chemical elements he is 
pleased to call ' Ireland.' " Connolly believed in 
Irish Nationality, but he would not have been satis- 
fied with the right to wear the badges of independ- 
ence; a national flag, a national parliament, a na- 
tional culture were in themselves nothing; but if 
they meant the right of the common men and 
women of Ireland to control their own lives and 
then own destinies then they meant everything in 
the world to him. Like Wolfe Tone he believed 
in " that numerous and respectable class, the men 
of no property "; to secure their rights in Ireland 
he was ready for anything. The national mold 
in which his Socialism came to be cast did not 
always appeal to his followers and associates : they 
regretted his increasing devotion to Irish 
Nationalism and his apparent indifference to pure 
Socialism; as one said later, "The high creed of 
Irish Nationalism became his daily rosary, while 
the higher creed of international humanity that 
[223] 



had so long bubbled from his eloquent lips was 
silent forever." As a matter of fact he tested 
alike theoretical Nationalism and theoretical 
Socialism by the facts; Nationalism, to be worth 
anything, must secure the rights of the common 
men and women who make up the bulk of the 
nation : Socialism, to be worth anything, must 
secure the rights not of " humanity " but of the 
human beings which compose it, and the principal 
human beings whose destiny an Irish Socialist 
could influence were the Irish. Connolly had 
never shared the extreme hostility to the Irish 
Volunteers which was characteristic of the bulk of 
the Citizen Army: while he championed the rights 
of his class he recognized that they formed, along 
with others, an Irish nation and that their surest 
charter of freedom would be the charter of free- 
dom of their country. But it must be a real, uni- 
versal and effective freedom if it were to be worth 
the winning. Under his guidance and influence 
the ideals of the Citizen Army began to approxi- 
mate more closely to those of the Irish Volunteers. 
The Irish Volunteers on the other hand were 
learning under other guidance to examine more 
closely the implications of the phrase " the inde- 
pendence of Ireland." Their guide was P. H. 
Pearse, a man of great gifts, a high and austere 
spirit filled with a great purpose. Through all his 
work, both in English and in Irish, plays, poems 
[224] 



and stones, runs the thread of an ardent devotion 
to goodness and beauty, to spiritual freedom, to 
the faith that tries to move mountains and is 
crushed beneath them. For many years his life 
seems to have been passed in the grave shadow of 
the sacrifice he felt that he was called upon to 
make for Ireland: he believed that he was ap- 
pointed to tread the path that Robert Emmet and 
Wolfe Tone had trodden before him, and his life 
was shaped so that it might be worthy of its end. 

To Pearse the ideal Irishman was Wolfe Tone, 
and it is significant that one of the first occasions 
upon which the Irish Volunteers and the Citizen 
Army held a joint demonstration was a pilgrimage 
to Tone's grave at Bodenstown. It was here that 
Pearse in 19 13 delivered an eloquent and memor- 
able address in which he proclaimed his belief that 
Wolfe Tone was the greatest Irishman who had 
ever lived. " We have come," his speech began, 
" to the holiest place in Ireland; holier to us even 
than the place where Patrick sleeps in Down. 
Patrick brought us life, but this man died for us." 
Pearse saw in Tone the greatest of all Irishmen 
because he saw in him the most complete incarna- 
tion of the Irish race, of its passion for freedom, 
its gallantry, its essential tolerance: and he urged 
his hearers not to let Tone's work and example 
perish. Quoting Tone's famous declaration of his 
objects and his means, of breaking the connection 
[225] 



with England by uniting the whole people of Ire- 
land, Pearse concluded : " I find here implicit all 
the philosophy of Irish Nationalism, all the 
teaching of the Gaelic League, and the later 
prophets. Ireland one and Ireland free — is not 
this the definition of Ireland a Nation? To that 
definition and to that program we declare our 
adhesion anew; pledging ourselves as Tone 
pledged himself — and in this sacred place, by this 
graveside, let us not pledge ourselves unless we 
mean to keep our pledge — we pledge ourselves 
to follow in the steps of Tone, never to rest, either 
by day or by night, until his work be accompHshed, 
deeming it to be the proudest of all privileges to 
fight for freedom, to fight not in despondency but 
in great joy, hoping for the victory in our day, but 
fighting on whether victory seem near or far, never 
lowering our ideal, never bartering one jot or 
tittle of our birthright, holding faith to the memory 
and the inspiration of Tone, and accounting our- 
selves base as long as we endure the evil thing 
against which he testified with his blood." 

To show that Wolfe Tone was a revolutionary, 
that he aimed at the complete overthrow of Eng- 
lish ascendancy in Ireland and at the severing of 
all political connection between the two countries, 
that he believed in an Ireland in which the desig- 
nations of Catholic and Protestant should be 
swallowed up in the common bonds of nationhood 
[226] 



— all this needed no proving, for it was matter of 
common knowledge with all to whom Tone's name 
was known. But it was necessary to do more than 
this. Pearse had to show in the first place that 
Tone might be taken as the normal and classical 
representative of the Irish national ideal, and in 
the second place that he was no mere ordinary 
constitution-monger but a teacher of a philosophy 
of nationality, valid not for his own age only, but 
always capable of furnishing guidance in the just 
and orderly upbuilding of a modern community, 
of satisfying at once the claims of the nation and 
the claims of its humblest member. To this task 
he gave the last months of his life: the last four 
" Tracts for the Times " were from his pen: the 
first was written at the end of 19 15, the last in 
March, 19 16, a fortnight before the Rising. The 
first of these four pamphlets was entitled 
" Ghosts," a title borrowed from Ibsen. It is an 
exposition of the national teaching of five Irish 
leaders, Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis, James Fin- 
tan Lalor, John Mitchel and Charles Stewart 
Parnell, all of whom held and taught that the na- 
tional claim of Ireland was for independence and 
separation; their ghosts haunt the generation 
which has disowned them, they will not be 
appeased till their authority is again acknowl- 
edged. A few sentences will make the thesis 
of this tract (and to some extent of the follow- 
[227] 



ing tracts) clear. " There has been nothing 
more terrible in Irish history that the failure of 
the last generation. Other generations have 
failed in Ireland, but they have failed nobly; or, 
failing ignobly, some man among them has re- 
deemed them from infamy by the splendor of his 
protest. But the failure of the last generation 
has been mean and shameful, and no man has 
arisen from it to do a splendid thing in virtue of 
which it shall be forgiven. The whole episode 
is squalid. It will remain the one sickening 
chapter in a story which, gallant or sorrowful, has 
everywhere else some exaltation of pride. . . . 
Even had the men themselves been less base, their 
failure would have been inevitable. When one 
thinks over the matter for a little one sees that 
they have built upon an untruth. They have con- 
ceived of nationality as a material thing whereas 
it is a spiritual thing. . . . Hence, the nation 
to them is not all holy, a thing inviolate and in- 
violable, a thing that a man dare not sell or dis- 
honor on pain of eternal perdition. They have 
thought of nationality as a thing to be negotiated 
about as men negotiate about a tariff or about a 
trade route. ... I make the contention that 
the national demand of Ireland is fixed and deter- 
mined; that that demand has been made by every 
generation; that we of this generation receive It 
as a trust from our fathers ; that we are bound by 
[228] 



it; that we have not the right to alter it or to 
abate it by one jot or tittle; and that any under- 
taking made in the name of Ireland to accept in 
full satisfaction of Ireland's claim anything less 
than the generations of Ireland have stood for is 
null and void. . . . The man who in the name 
of Ireland accepts as a ' final settlement ' any- 
thing less by one fraction of an iota than separa- 
tion from England will be repudiated by the 
new generation as surely as O'Connell was repudi- 
ated by the generation that came after him. The 
man who in return for the promise of a thing 
which is not merely less than separation but which 
denies separation and declares the Union per- 
petual, the man who in return for this declares 
peace between England and Ireland and sacrifices 
to England as a peace-holocaust the blood of 
50,000 Irishmen is guilty of so immense an infi- 
delity, so immense a crime against the Irish na- 
tion, that one can only say of him that it were 
better for that man (as it were certainly better 
for his country) that he had not been born." 
The pamphlet concludes with a historic retrospect 
of the Irish struggle for independence till the end 
of the seventeenth century, of the Anglo-Irish 
claim for independence in the eighteenth century, 
and with quotations from the five great Irish 
leaders since the last decade of that century join- 
ing in the same claim. 

[229] 



The next tract, " The Separatist Idea," was a 
detailed study of Wolfe Tone's pohtical teaching. 
Tone was not merely a " heroic soul," he pos- 
sessed an " austere and piercing intellect," which, 
" dominating Irish political thought for over a 
century," had given Ireland " its political defini- 
tions and values." Tone had written in his 
Autobiography, " I made speedily [in 1790] 
what was to me a great discovery, though I might 
have found it in Swift or Molyneux, that the in- 
fluence of England was the radical vice of our 
Government, and that consequently Ireland would 
never be either free, prosperous or happy until 
she was independent and that independence was 
unattainable whilst the connection with England 
existed." In a pamphlet called " An Argument 
on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland " Tone 
(signing himself "A Northern Whig") had 
tried to convince the Dissenters " that they and 
the Catholics had but one common interest and 
one common enemy: that the depression and slav- 
ery of Ireland was produced and perpetuated by 
the divisions existing between them, and that, con- 
sequently, to assert the independence of their 
country, and their own individual liberties, it was 
necessary to forget all former feuds, to consoli- 
date the entire strength of the whole nation and 
to form for the future but one people." In his 
earlier years Tone had n'ot been a Republican, but 
[230] 



Republicanism was the cre^d which he finally pro- 
fessed. He defined the aim of an Irish Constitu- 
tion as the promotion of " The Rights of Man in 
Ireland." To secure this end reliance must be 
had not on a section of the nation but on the 
nation as a whole. " If the men of property will 
not support us," he said, " they must fall: we can 
support ourselves by the aid of that numerous and 
respectable class of the community — the men of 
no property." " In this glorious appeal to 
Caesar," comments Pearse, " modern Irish democ- 
racy has its origin." Tone then was not merely 
a Republican and a Separatist but a Democrat 
prepared for a democratic and revolutionary 
policy. 

In his next tract " The Spiritual Nation " 
Pearse analyzed the national teaching of Thomas 
Davis, who was to him the embodiment of the idea 
of the spiritual side of nationality. Davis was a 
Separatist (Pearse puts this, by quotation from his 
writings, beyond reasonable doubt) but he laid 
stress more upon the spiritual than upon the 
material side of Irish independence. He saw in 
nationality " the sum of the facts, spiritual and 
intellectual, which mark off cme nation from 
another," the language, the folklore, the litera- 
ture, the music, the art, the social customs. " The 
Insistence on the spiritual fact of nationality is 
Davis's distinctive contribution to political 
[231] 



thought In Ireland, but it is not the whole of 
Davis." To secure spiritual independence, 
material freedom is necessary, and such freedom 
can only be found In political independence. One 
rhetorical paragraph of Davis's makes his attitude 
clear. " Now, Englishmen, listen to us. Though 
you were to-morrow to give us the best tenures on 
earth — though you were to equalize Presby- 
terian, Catholic and Episcopalian — though you 
were to give us the amplest representation in 
your Senate — though you were to restore our 
absentees, disencumber us of your debt, and re- 
dress every one of our fiscal wrongs — and 
though, in addition to all this, you plundered the 
treasuries of the world to lay gold at our feet and 
exhausted the resources of your genius to do us 
worship and honor — still we tell you- — we tell 
you in the name of liberty and country — we tell 
you in the name of enthusiastic hearts, thoughtful 
souls and fearless spirits — we tell you by the 
past, the present and the future, we would spurn 
your gifts If the condition were that Ireland 
should remain a province. We tell you and all 
whom it may concern, come what may — bribery 
or deceit, justice, policy or war — we tell you, in 
the name of Ireland, that Ireland shall be a 
nation." 

In the last pamphlet, " The Sovereign 
People," Pearse essayed the hardest task of all. 
[232] 



It was Introduced by the short preface, dated 
31st March, 1916, "This pamphlet concludes 
the examination of the Irish definition of freedom 
which I promised in ' Ghosts.' For my part I 
have no more to say." It is told that he entreated 
the printer to have it published at once: he wished 
his last words, the final manifesto of his party, 
to be in the hands of the public before he went 
into the Rising. The tract is an attempt to 
establish, on the basis of the writings of James 
Fintan Lalor, the thesis that the independence 
claimed for Ireland is of a republican and demo- 
cratic type. He expressed his views clearly and 
unequivocally upon such questions as the rights 
of private property, the individual ownership of 
the material resources of the community; and 
universal suffrage. Pearse's views as expressed 
in this pamphlet are s.een to be practically Identi- 
cal with those of James Connolly, and there Is 
little doubt that It was upon the basis of some 
such understanding that Pearse's followers and 
those of Connolly joined forces at the last. 
" The nation's sovereignty," the exposition runs, 
" extends not only to all the men and women of 
the nation, but to all the material possessions of 
the nation, the nation's soil and all Its resources, all 
wealth and all wealth-producing processes within 
the nation. In other words, no private right to 
property Is good as against the public right of the 
[233] 



nation. But the nation is under a moral obliga- 
tion so to exercise its public right as to secure 
strictly equal rights and liberties to every man and 
woman within the nation. . . . No class in the 
nation has rights inferior to those of any other 
class. No class in the nation is entitled to 
privileges superior to those of any other class. 
. . . To insist upon the soverign control of the 
nation over all the property within the nation is 
not to disallow the right to private property. It 
is for the nation to determine to what extent 
private property may be held by its members and 
in what items of the nation's material resources 
private property may be allowed. A nation may, 
for instance, determine, as the free Irish nation 
determined and enforced for many centuries, that 
private ownership shall not exist in land, that the 
whole of a nation's soil is the public property of 
the nation. . . . There is nothing divine or 
sacrosanct in any of these arrangements; they are 
matters of purely human concern, matters for 
discussion and adjustment between the members 
of a nation, matters to be decided on finally by the 
nation as a whole; and matters in which the nation 
as a whole can revise or reverse its decision when- 
ever it seems good in the common interests to do 
so. . . . In order that the people may be able to 
choose as a legislation and as a government men 
and women really and fully representative of 
[234] 



themselves, they will keep the choice actually or 
virtually in the hands of the whole people . . . 
they will, if wise, adopt the widest possible 
franchise — give a vote to every adult man and 
woman of sound mind. To restrict the franchise 
in any respect is to prepare the way for some 
future usurpation of the rights of the sovereign 
people. The people, that is the whole people, 
must remain sovereign not only in theory but in 
fact. ... It is in fact true that the repositories 
of the Irish tradition, as well the spiritual tradi- 
tion of nationality as the kindred tradition of 
stubborn physical resistance to England, have 
been the great, faithful, splendid, common people, 
that dumb multitudinous throng which sorrowed 
during the penal night, which bled in '98, which 
starved in the Famine; and which is here still — 
what is left of it — unbought and unterrified. 
Let no man be mistaken as to who will be lord in 
Ireland, when Ireland is free. The people will 
be lord and master." These theses are enforced 
by quotations from Lalor, the most outspoken 
Democrat and Radical in the tradition of Irish 
nationalism. The pamphlet concludes with a de- 
fense of John Mitchel (who adopted Lalor's 
teaching) against the charge of hating the Eng- 
lish people. " Mitchel, the least apologetic of 
men, was at pains to explain that his hate was not 
of English men and women, but of the English' 



thing which called itself a government in Ireland, 
of the English Empire, of English commercialism 
supported by English militarism, a thing wholly 
evil, perhaps the most evil thing that there has 
ever been in the world." 

On Palm Sunday, 191 6, the Union of Irish 
Labor and Irish Nationality was proclaimed in 
a striking fashion. In the evening of that day 
Connolly hoisted over Liberty Hall, the head- 
quarters of the Citizen Army, the Irish tricolor of 
orange, white and green, the flag designed by the 
Young Irelanders in 1848 to symbolize the union 
of the Orange and Green by the white bond of a 
common brotherhood. On Easter Monday the 
Irish Repubhc was proclaimed in arms in Dublin. 



[236] 



AFTER THE RISING 

There are many interesting topics of enquiry in 
connection with the Easter Rising: but they relate 
to points of detail or affect the responsibility of 
individuals; they do not concern the history of 
Sinn Fein. The Rising was the work not of Sinn 
Fein, but of the leaders of the Republican Party 
in the Irish Volunteers and of the Citizen Army. 
Of the signatories to the proclamation of the 
Republic only one had any sort of connection with 
Sinn Fein and he had been a reforming, rather 
than an orthodox, Sinn Feiner. But the general 
public, some from mere instinct, others from a 
desire to discredit a movement which they disliked 
and feared, persisted in calling the Rising by the 
name of the " Sinn Fein Rebellion," and substi- 
tuted " Sinn Fein " for " Irish " in speaking of 
the Volunteers. In truth it would have been im- 
possible for Sinn Fein, even if it had wished to do 
so, to repudiate all responsibility for the Rising. 
It had from the beginning proclaimed the inde- 
pendence of Ireland, not (it Is true) In the form 
of an Irish Republic, but in the form of a National 
Constitution free from any subordination to the 
Parliament of England : It had renounced the idea 
[237] 



of an appeal to arms in view of the certain failure 
of an armed rising: but it had not repudiated 
revolution upon principle and it had admitted that 
in certain contingencies Ireland might with pro- 
priety appeal to arms to secure its independence. 
The only criticism it could make upon the Rising 
would have been that it was a well-intentioned 
error of judgment, the error of men who had 
mistaken their means and their opportunity for ! 
accomplishing an object good in itself. It is ; 
highly improbable that any such criticism would 
under the circumstances have been made in public 
by the leaders of Sinn Fein: in any case they were 
not afforded the opportunity to make it, for they 
were arrested and deported as part of the 
measures of repression taken after the Rising had 
collapsed. 

At the time of the Rising Ireland was still far 
from being either Sinn Fein or Republican. The 
prestige of parliamentarianism had been shaken \ 
and its strength impaired: expectations had - 
been disappointed, but the reasons for the failure,/! 
were still the subject of keen discussion, and thj '. 
Sinn Fein explanation was by no means uni-* \ 
versally accepted. Convinced Republicans were., 
a minority, insignificant except for their ability 
and fervor. The mass of Nationalists felt 
disturbed and uneasy. It was plain that their'^ 
cause was losing ground, and that mere pre- J 
[238] 



occupation with the war was not the sole reason 
for the growing indifference of England to the 
government of Ireland. Nationalist Ireland was 
represented (by people who affected to speak 
more In sorrow than in anger) as having disowned 
the patriotic lead of Mr. Redmond and as failing 
in its duty, and this view was clearly becoming the 
prevalent view In England. The policy pursued 
by the War Office towards Nationalist recruits 
(a policy described by a member of the War 
Cabinet as "malignant") was slowly killing 
recruiting, and the decline of recruiting was 
claimed to be a justification of the policy that pro- 
duced it, and that by people perfectly well aware 
of the facts. The favor shown to the Ulster Vol- 
unteers had not Induced them to go in a body to 
the war: but while they were reported to have 
done magnificently, the National Volunteers were 
held to have done little and to have done it with a 
bad grace. The advent of the Coalition Govern- 
ment, which Included some of the bitterest ene- 
mies of Irish Nationalism, did not mend matters. 
Mr. Redmond, it is true, was offered a seat In the 
Coalition Cabinet and declined the offer. It 
seemed to many Irishmen at the time that Mr. 
Redmond might very well have accepted It: that 
having stretched a point In promising Irish assist- 
ance in the war out of gratitude for a coming 
recognition of Irish claims, It was a mere standing 

[239] 



upon ceremony to refuse to stretch another point 
and enter an EngHsh Ministry. But Mr. Red- 
mond decided in view of the state of feeling in 
Ireland that he had gone as far as was prudent. 
His generous enthusiasm had received a shock, 
first in the hints of Irish disapproval at his failure 
to take full advantage of his opportunity, sec- 
ondly when he came into contact with the cold 
hostility of the War Office. His slowly waning 
influence in Ireland might have vanished if he had 
advanced farther on the path of unconditional co- 
operation. It had been for years a maxim — the 
maxim — of the Nationalist Party to accept no 
office under the Union Constitution, and no office 
under the Crown until the claims of Ireland had 
been conceded. These claims had not been con- 
ceded, and the prospect that they would ever be 
conceded was growing fainter. Had he repre- 
sented Ireland under an Irish Constitution, even 
a Provisional Constitution, the case would have 
been different: Nationalist Ireland would have 
followed him, as England then followed Mr. 
Asquith: but to enter the Cabinet under the cir- 
cumstances as the representative of Ireland 
seemed to be merely to forfeit by his entry the 
only ground upon which he had a claim to enter 
it. His decision left the way open to the almost 
unfettered activities of the opponents of his policy 
both in England and in Ireland. The strength 
[240] 



of England in time of war, the readiness of her 
public men to subordinate, within limits, the strife 
of parties in the interests of the Commonwealth, 
meant the weakness of Ireland in the end. It 
was loudly proclaimed in England that the happy 
cooperation of days of stress must not be allowed 
to be broken up when peace dawned: that the 
strife of parties must be mitigated when war 
was over: but Ireland knew that she had been 
in later years their chief battleground, and that 
any mitigation of their quarrel, while it might 
be to the advantage of English public life, could 
only be brought about at the expense of her na- 
tional hopes. And in Ireland the Executive, pur- 
suing a fixed anti-national policy, tempered only 
by the prudence, the theoretical liberalism, or the 
bland indifference of successive Chief Secretaries, 
could henceforth count on the steady backing of 
friends in power over the water. 

The Rising came like a flash of lightning in an 
evening twilight, illuminating and terrifying. It 
was not entirely unexpected : those whose duty and 
those whose pleasure it is to suspect everything 
had been uneasy for some time. The few people 
who were in touch with the inner circle* of the 
Irish Volunteers had long known that something 
was in progress. But the authorities had nothing 
definite to go upon, and the majority of Irishmen 
knew nothing definite about it. When news came 
[241] 



that Dublin had been seized, that an Irish Re- 
pubHc had been proclaimed, and that troops were 
hurrying across from England, the prevailing feel- 
ing was one of stupefaction. Even the Unionist 
newspapers, never at a loss before in pointing 
the Irish moral, were stunned for the moment. 
When the facts began to be realized, Unionist 
and Nationalist joined in a common condemna- 
tion of the Rising, which, unable to accomphsh 
its professed aim, could have no real effect beyond 
that of hampering the AUied cause. Later on 
Nationalists began to fear and Unionists to hope 
that it meant the death of Home Rule, or at least 
its postponement to an indefinite future. 

When the Rising was crushed and the leaders 
and their followers had surrendered it is question- 
able whether the fortunes of Republicanism in 
Ireland had ever been at so low an ebb. All their 
plans had miscarried; their very counsels had 
been contradictory and confused. German assist- 
ance had disappointed them; the country had not 
supported them; and the army had made an end 
of their resistance and had brought their strong- 
holds about their heads : their leaders were in 
custody, not even as prisoners of war: all of their 
followers who had shown that they could be 
counted on were either dead or in jail. There 
was no district in Ireland that had not sent men 
to the war: many of them had died at the hands 
[242] 



of the Germans to whom the Republican leaders 
had looked for aid, many of them were risking 
their lives every hour; it was not from the friends 
and neighbors of these men that sympathy for the 
Rising could have been expected. Sinn Fein was 
involved in the general feeling; if it had not fo- 
mented the Rising, what had it done to discour- 
age it? Was it not the stimulus which had 
spurred more daring spirits into action? 

A bruised reed never seemed less difficult to 
break or less worth the breaking. It was decided 
to break it ad majorem cautelam. 

Four days after the surrender Pearse and two 
others after a secret trial were shot in the morn- 
ing: the next day and the next others were shot. 
There was a pause of three days, and the shoot- 
ing was resumed till thirteen had paid the penalty. 
After the thirteenth execution, a proclamation was 
issued that the General Officer Commanding in 
Chief had " found it imperative " to inflict these 
punishments, which it was hoped would act as a 
deterrent and show that such proceedings as those 
of the Rising could not be tolerated. Two more 
executions followed, that of James Connolly and 
another. At the same time arrests took place all 
over the country. Three thousand prisoners who 
had taken no part in the Rising were collected, 
many of them as innocent of any complicity in the 
affair as the Prime Minister. To have been at 
[243] 



any time a member of the Irish Volunteers was 
sufficient cause for arrest and deportation. They 
were taken through the streets in lorries and in 
furniture vans at the dead of night and shipped 
for unknown destinations. 

In a normally governed country, a strong Gov- 
ernment enjoying the support of the community 
has a comparatively easy task in dealing with 
an unsuccessful rebellion, if a rebellion should 
occur. It can shoot the leaders, if it thinks them 
worth shooting, or do practically what it pleases 
with them, and gain nothing but credit for its 
firmness or clemency (as the case may be). But 
in a country not normally governed (and no one 
either inside or outside Ireland considered the 
Irish government to be normal) the matter is 
more intricate. If the Government is united, has 
clean hands and unhmited force, and is prepared 
to employ force indefinitely, it may do as it 
pleases: but few Governments are in this position 
and those which are not have to pick their steps. 
In the case of the Easter Rising the Government 
began by going forward with great confidence 
beyond the point whence retreat was possible and 
then determined very carefully to pick its steps 
back again. At first it acted " with vigor and 
firmness " : it handed the situation over to the care 
of a competent and tried officer, who proceeded 
to treat it as a mere matter of departmental 
[244] 



routine. He was alert, prompt and businesslike. 
He did not hesitate to take what seemed " neces- 
sary steps " or to speak out where speaking plainly- 
seemed called for. He let it be known that he 
had come to act and he did what he had come for. 

During the week of the executions an almost 
unbroken silence reigned in Ireland. The first 
hint that anything was wrong came on the cables 
from America. The men who were shot in Dub- 
lin had been accorded a public funeral in New 
York. Empty hearses followed by a throng of 
mourners had passed through streets crowded 
with sympathizers standing with bared heads. 
Anxious messages from British agents warned the 
Government that a demonstration like this could 
not be disregarded. The executions were over, 
but the Prime Minister decided to go to Ireland 
to enquire into the situation on the spot. When 
he landed the tide of Irish feeling had already 
turned. 

The catastrophic change of feeling In Ireland is 
not difficult to explain. The Rising had occurred 
suddenly and had ended in a sudden and hopeless 
failure. The leaders and their followers had 
surrendered, and the authorities held them at 
their absolute disposal. The utter hopelessness 
of any attempt to establish a Republic, or effect 
any other change In the government of Ireland 
by armed force, especially at such a time, had 
[245] 



been clearly demonstrated. England held Ire- 
land in the hollow of its hand. After four days' 
cool deliberation it was decided to shoot the 
leaders. They were not brought to open trial 
on the charge of high treason or on any other 
charge : the authorities who carried out the sen- 
tence were those who passed judgment upon their 
guilt and the only people who ever heard or saw 
the evidence upon which the judgment was based. 
They were shot in batches: for days the lesson 
was hammered home in stroke after stroke that 
these men were entitled neither to open trial and 
proof of their guilt before execution, nor to the 
treatment of captured enemies. The conclusion 
drawn by Nationalist Ireland was that if they 
had been Englishmen they would have been tried 
by English courts and sentenced by the judgment 
of their countrymen: that if they had been Ger- 
mans or Turks they would have been treated as 
prisoners of war: but that being Irishmen they 
were in a class apart, members of a subject race, 
the mere property of a courtmartial. The ap- 
plause of Parliament when the Prime Minister 
announced the executions was taken to represent 
the official sanction of the English people and 
their agreement with this attitude towards Ire- 
land. It was resented in Ireland with a fierce 
and sudden passion: a tongue of flame seemed 
to devour the work of long years in a single night. 
[246] 



After the execution of Pearse it would have been 
vain to argue against him that he had appealed 
to Germany for aid and invited to Ireland hands 
red with the blood of Irish soldiers: the reply 
would have been that he might have done so or 
he might not; that it had never been proved what 
he did; that he had acted for the best; that 

What matters it, if he was Ireland's friend? 
There are but two great parties in the end. 

The Prime Minister, less than a month after the 
Rising, spent a week in Ireland prosecuting en- 
quiries : they resulted in two conclusions, one that 
" the existing machinery of Irish government " 
had broken down, the other that a unique oppor- 
tunity had offered itself for a settlement. Ne- 
gotiations for the desired settlement were, on the 
Prime Minister's invitation, begun by Mr. Lloyd 
George. He contented himself with taking up 
the first settlement that came to hand, the old 
proposal for partition; but during the negotia- 
tions he left the idea In the mind of the Nation- 
alist leader that the partition proposed was only 
temporary and in the mind of the Unionist leader 
that it was to be permanent. Each asserted that 
Mr. Lloyd George had been explicit in his state- 
ment, and the unexplained discrepancy wrecked 
the negotiations. Even had they succeeded be- 
tween the parties principally concerned, they 
would never have led to anything; for the Unlon- 
[247] 



ist members of the Coalition when there seemed 
to be a risk of agreement, declared that they 
would have no settlement at all. The Prime 
Minister and his deputy yielded and reconstituted 
"the existing machinery of Irish government" 
by reappointing the former Viceroy and replacing 
the Liberal Chief Secretary by a Unionist. Ap- 
parently their chief object was not so much to 
make the Government in Ireland acceptable to 
Irishmen as to make it less objectionable to 
Unionists. The result in Ireland was what 
might have been foreseen. Any idea there may 
have been that the English Government was 
really desirous of establishing peace and justice 
in Ireland vanished like smoke. Mr. Redmond 
warned the Government of the consequences of 
their " inaction " (if any policy which was stead- 
ily producing the most profound revulsion in Irish 
feeling could be described by that word) but the 
Government was obdurate. It refused to release 
the interned suspects, it refused to treat them 
as political prisoners, it refused to mitigate the 
application of martial law: and gave as its reason 
the fact that the state of the country still " gave 
cause for anxiety." The only party that had no 
cause for "anxiety" as to its future was Sinn Fein. 
The resentment at the execution of the leaders 
of the Rising had not confined itself to the indul- 
gence of feelings of rage and sorrow. It had led 
[248] 



to an eager Inquiry into what it was that had 
caused these men to do what they did. People 
who had hardly heard of Sinn Fein before wanted 
to know precisely what it was and what It taught : 
people who had not known Pearse and Connolly 
when they were alive were full of curiosity about 
them, their principles and their writings. Much 
of this curiosity was morbid and led nowhere : but 
a great deal of it led large numbers of people very 
far indeed. Sinn Fein pamphlets began to be In 
demand: a month after the Rising It was hardly 
possible to procure a single one of them. But if 
they could not be bought, thumbed and tattered 
copies were passed from hand to hand : their 
teachings and the doctrines of Sinn Fein were 
discussed all over Ireland. The (to many) sur- 
prising fact became known that the Rising was 
not an attempt to help Germany or to put Ireland 
into German possession, but to free Ireland from 
all foreign Influence: that the leaders proclaimed 
themselves followers of Tone and Mitchel and 
Davis and Parnell, that they claimed that Irish 
Nationalism meant according to these exponents 
(and no man in Ireland ventured to question their 
authority) Irish Independence, nothing less and 
nothing more. The Instinct for freedom, the 
feeling that the existing Government of Ireland 
had not for a hundred years fulfilled the primary 
functions of government, became a reasoned and 
[249] 



rooted conviction that something more was 
needed to mend it than mere Home Rule. The 
price that Ireland had been asked to pay for 
Home Rule, that it was still pertinaciously 
pressed to agree to, the partition of Ireland, 
seemed an unforgivable treachery beside the fair 
prospect of an Ireland one and indivisible, In 
which Orange and Green, Protestant and Catho- 
lic were united in the love and service of a com- 
mon country. The pohcies of the past, barren 
as they now seemed of content and substance, 
were abandoned for the new promise of a com- 
monwealth in which all Irishmen should be equal, 
in which the worker saw a prospect of a better 
and a fuller life than without it he could hope 
to have. This had been the ideal of the Rising; 
but it was the bitter truth that the Rising had 
not brought it any nearer, and that no Rising 
seemed likely to be any more successful, Sinn 
Fein with its policy of self-reliance, of refusing 
to recognize what it hoped by so doing to bring to 
nothing, of distrust of all policies of reaching 
freedom by an acknowledgment of subjection 
offered the means of realizing what the Rising 
had failed to bring nearer. But Sinn Fein could 
not be accepted as It stood: offering the Consti- 
tution of 1782 it had failed to carry with it more 
than a few doctrinaire enthusiasts: agreeing to 
the constitution which the leaders of the Rising 

[250] 



died for It might (and did) carry the country 
with it. 

All this was going on under the operation of 
martial law. Members of Parliament did not 
know It: the Competent Military Authority had 
no suspicion of it. It was believed that all that 
was required to " appease " the country, to re- 
store confidence in the Government, to bring back 
the happy days when Ireland was " the one bright 
spot " was to release the prisoners and resume 
negotiations for a " settlement." In December, 
19 1 6, the Asquith Ministry fell. According to 
its successors it had carried the art of doing noth- 
ing to its highest perfection: they were going to 
do everything at once. The new Prime Minister 
made vague promises of an attempt to settle the 
Irish question in the immediate future, and finally 
on Christmas Eve all the interned prisoners ex- 
cept those undergoing penal servitude, were sent 
back to Ireland. They were received with an 
enthusiasm which must have proved disquieting to 
the believers in compromise and negotiation. 

Everything began again precisely where It had 
left off. The prisoners had been requested to 
give a pledge that, if released, they would cease 
to engage in political propaganda objectionable 
to the Government. This they had stoutly re- 
fused to do, and they had been released at last 
without conditions. Apparently it was supposed 

[251] 



that the operation of martial law and the prom- 
ises of the new Government would exercise a 
moderating influence: but martial law was only a 
standing challenge, and the sincerity of the Gov- 
ernment was no longer believed in. If it had 
been even moderately sincere it might have rallied 
to the side of compromise those large numbers of 
men who in every country have an instinctive 
dread of new and untried policies and leaders. 
But it was soon plain that a Prime Minister 
pledged to everybody was pledged to nobody. 

By the middle of February, 19 17, the Sinn Fein 
leaders were at work again. Nationality re- 
appeared as a weekly paper. It appealed no 
longer to a few enthusiasts but to a wide public 
eager to learn more of the only movement which 
promised anything definite. Before the Rising, 
Sinn Fein had seemed to aim at the impossible 
by means beyond the powers of average human 
nature: it did not seem possible that any large 
body of Irishmen should try to secure independ- 
ence by the hard path of Sinn Fein, when there 
was a prospect of something (to all outward 
appearance) nearly as good to be gained by re- 
cording a vote for the right man at elections. It 
was now plain to the average Nationalist that the 
parliamentary prospect held no promise: that the 
Irish Parliamentary Party were no longer list- 
ened to, and that the sworn enemies of Irish na- 
[252] 



tlonality were in the seats of power both in Ire- 
land and in England. Mr. Redmond, confronted 
alternately in England by the iron insolence of 
the Tories and the smiling sinuosities of the 
Prime Minister, manned his guns to the last: 
but he had no longer the support of the country. 
The country was beginning to rally to the party 
which alone seemed to be the party of fixed prin- 
ciples : which had another standard by which to 
measure national rights than the temporary pos- 
sibilities, varying from month to month, offered 
by the difficulties confronting Enghsh Ministers: 
the party which did not entreat but demanded. 
Sinn Fein did not promise now any more than in 
the days of its obscurity that national freedom 
could be won by the anaemic struggles of the di- 
vision lobbies in the House : it warned its fol- 
lowers that the way would be long and steep, 
that to shun the steep places was to miss the 
traclc, and that the path did not cross the water. 
It had said this before, but it said it now to ears 
ready to receive it. If men had died for Ireland 
(men asked) facing the old enemy, what lesser 
sacrifice could be called too great? A wave of 
enthusiasm which no appeal to policy or prudence 
could withstand swept over the country when the 
new campaign began. 

Nationality with a tenacity of purpose that 
nothing seemed able to disturb began its new 

[253] 



series with the old lesson, the decay of Ireland 
under the Union. As if there had been no Ris- 
ing, no imprisonments, no threats of summary 
repression, the doctrine was again proclaimed 
with deadly deliberation that the Union had de- 
stroyed and was destroying the prosperity of Ire- 
land even in those districts which clung to it with 
most affection. The population of Antrim, Ar- 
magh, Derry and Down was steadily declining 
under a system which the inhabitants declared es- 
sential to their continued existence. It asserted 
the right of Ireland to prevent food being ex- 
ported from the country to feed strangers while 
the country that supplied it was left to starve, 
and proposed the formation of a Watch Com- 
mittee for every seaport in the country. The 
very first number contained a statement of the 
policy of an appeal no longer to a Government 
pledged to disregard it, but to the Peace Con- 
ference which must be summoned on the conclu- 
sion of the war. The advertisement of the Irish 
Nation League, a body independent of Sinn Fein, 
already showed how far Sinn Fein principles had 
spread in Ireland. " The Irish Nation League 
claims the right of Ireland to recognition as a 
Sovereign State. It asserts too and claims Ire- 
land's right to representation at any International 
Peace Conference. It offers determined and 
resolute resistance to any attempt to enforce 
[254] 



Conscription. ... It calls on the Irish people to 
rely on themselves alone. . . . Members elected 
under the auspices of the Irish Nation League 
will remain under the control of its Supreme Coun- 
cil and will only act at Westminster when the 
Council so decides. Never again must power be 
placed in the hands of a parliamentary party to 
mislead the country or to sacrifice opportunities." 
In March Nationality announced the formation 
of a National Council to support the admission 
of Ireland to the Peace Conference and " to safe- 
guard the general interests of the nation." But 
though admission to the Peace Conference was 
the political objective of Ireland for the moment 
it was not regarded as its ultimate or only aim. 
The Peace Conference was an opportunity to be 
made use of when circumstances brought it about, 
a precious and unique opportunity, but Ireland's 
main and serious work was to develop her own 
resources and her own powers of resistance. Ac- 
cordingly, though Sinn Fein declared repeatedly 
its intention of carrying the Irish case before the 
Peace Conference, its main work was still to or- 
ganize and consolidate opposition to the two chief 
measures now openly proclaimed as in contempla- 
tion, the partition of Ireland and the enforcement 
of Conscription. Both these measures were in 
contradiction to the claim that " the only satis- 
factory settlement of the Irish Question now is 

[255] 



the independence of Ireland." And it was not 
hard to show that the professed objects of the 
war were incompatible with the policy of refus- 
ing self-government to Ireland. " When Eng- 
land declared," wrote Nationality, " that she en- 
tered this war with the object of asserting the 
freedom of Small Nations the Lord delivered 
her into our hands." 

There were not wanting signs that the Sinn 
Fein policy was rapidly becoming the policy of 
a Nationalist Ireland. By the summer of 19 17 
at least a dozen Irish newspapers were declared 
exponents of the Sinn Fein policy. An election 
for North Roscommon in February had resulted 
in the return of the Sinn Fein candidate by an 
overwhelming majority. The next contested 
election was in May and was by common consent 
regarded as a test election. It was a straight 
fight between the Parliamentary Party and Sinn 
Fein. Each party put its full strength into the 
contest and Sinn Fein won; the majority, it is 
true, was a small one but it was more useful than 
a large one, for it was both an endorsement and 
an incentive. The Manchester Guardian frankly 
declared that the Sinn Fein victory under the cir- 
cumstances was equivalent to a serious defeat of 
the British Army in the field. 

The reply of the Government to the result of 
the North Roscommon election had been the re- 
[256] 



arrest and deportation of some of the released 
prisoners, to whom a number of others, some of 
them prominent Gaelic Leaguers, were added; the 
Chief Secretary defended this action by saying 
that he had decided " although there can be no 
charge and although there can be no trial " that 
it was better for these men to be out of Ireland 
than to be in it. The Parliamentary Party, op- 
posed upon principle to Sinn Fein, saw that meas- 
ures such as these meant its ultimate and complete 
triumph, but no arguments could move the de- 
termination of the Government to rely upon 
force. They seemed to feel that force was the 
only weapon that was left them and that they 
might as well use it at once; while Sinn Fein 
could point to the employment of it as evidence 
of its own reiterated but constantly challenged 
contention as to the real attitude of all English 
Governments towards Ireland. And had the 
Prime Minister and his advisers, whoever they 
may have been, deliberately set themselves to 
prove to Ireland that they were not the wise 
representatives of an enlightened and friendly 
democracy (which the Parliamentary Party had 
up to this represented them to be) but the jealous 
and implacable guardians of a subject and hated 
race (which Sinn Fein had always asserted that 
they were) it is very doubtful whether they could 
have bettered their record in a single detail. 
[257] 



The Parliamentary Party, fighting for its life, 
with the ground in Ireland slipping from under 
its feet, appealed pathetically to its old services 
and old friendship, to the memory of the Irish- 
men who had fallen in the war, to the opinion 
of moderate men, to prudence and justice; it 
could not deflect by one hair's breadth the course 
chosen by the Cabinet. The fact seems to be 
that the Tory members who had always hated the 
Parliamentary Party saw the chance of paying 
back old scores and embraced it regardless of 
the consequences; while the Liberals, real and 
so-called, thought the Parliamentary Party's in- 
fluence was waning in Ireland, and threw them 
over without remorse : they had got as much out 
of them as was to be got, and for the rest they 
might shift for themselves. It was very difl^cult 
to believe that (as the Prime Minister said) the 
" dominant consideration was the war " and that 
preoccupation with it was the reason for his re- 
fusal to attend to the Irish problem. Everybody 
knew that Ministers, when they were interested, 
found time for many other things than the prose- 
cution of the war. What was done and what 
was not done, and the reasons given both for 
action and for inaction, only served to deepen 
the impression of the insincerity of the Cabinet. 
Almost simultaneously the Parliamentary Party 
and Sinn Fein resolved upon an appeal from the 
[258] 



English Ministry and the English Parliament to 
bodies that might be presumed to be less partial. 
The Irish Party withdrew from Parliament and 
sent a Manifesto to the United States (now on 
the verge of its declaration of war) and the self- 
governing Dominions. Sinn Fein summoned a 
Convention to meet in Dublin to assert the inde- 
pendence of Ireland, its status as a nation, and 
its right to representation at the Peace Confer- 
ence. This was the first, but it was not to be 
the only, occasion upon which the policy of the 
Parliamentary Party was molded, against its will, 
by the pressure of facts, into a tacit acknowledg- 
ment of the justice of the Sinn Fein contention, 
that parliamentary action was useless. The only 
difference was that while Sinn Fein held that it 
always was and always would be useless, English 
policy being what it always had been, the Parlia- 
mentary Party held that the Cabinet had by its 
action since the Rising destroyed the efficacy of 
the normally useful and legitimate means of re- 
form. 

The effect of this joint appeal from the Cabinet 
to the impartial opinion of English-speaking coun- 
tries and belligerent nations was to induce the 
Prime Minister to bring forward " proposals " 
for the settlement of the question. He proposed 
the exclusion of six counties of Ulster from the 
Home Rule Act, if and when it became operative, 
[259] 



the exclusion to be subject to reconsideration after 
five years; the immediate establishment of an Irish 
Council (in which the excluded counties were to 
have the same number of delegates as all the rest 
of Ireland put together) to legislate for Ireland 
during the war; and a reconsideration of the finan- 
cial clauses of the Act. Failing the acceptance 
of this solution, the Prime Minister saw nothing 
for it but to summon a representative body of 
Irishmen to suggest the best means of governing 
their own country. 

The Prime Minister's proposals, whether the 
product of his own or of some equally ingenious 
but equally uninformed brain, were promptly re- 
jected by everybody: his concluding suggestion 
was, after some delay, judged worthy of a trial, 
the Ulster party stipulating expressly for freedom 
to refuse to submit to any findings of the Conven- 
tion with which it did not choose to agree. They 
were practically informed by the Leader of the 
House of Commons that their dissent was incom- 
patible with " the substantial agreement " which 
alone would justify the Government in giving 
effect to the findings of the Convention. 

To claim that the setting up of the Conven- 
tion was a sincere attempt to solve the problem 
of Irish Government Is to make a demand upon 
faith which it might be noble, but would certainly 
be extremely difficult, to grant. The incorpora- 
[260] 



tion in the letter by which the Prime Minister 
suggested it of an official proposal of heads of a 
settlement could serve no other purpose than to 
indicate that a particular solution had found 
favor with the proposer in advance : and to allow 
the Ulster Party the right of veto was to per- 
petuate and sanction the attitude which every- 
body in the Three Kingdoms knew to be the very 
obstacle which the Convention was blandly invited 
to surmount. It says much for the general desire 
of Ireland for peace and settlement that the out- 
come of the Convention (compassed by secrecy 
which it was declared a criminal offense to violate 
while it sat) was awaited generally with an anx- 
ious and almost pathetic expectation. 

Sinn Fein promptly refused to take any part 
in the proceedings. It had been formally invited 
to do so, but as five places only were assigned 
to it, a number far below that to which its actual 
strength in the country was known to entitle it, 
it was not intended that it should have very much 
weight in the conclusions. Besides, the only 
solution which it was known to favor, the inde- 
pendence of Ireland, was the only solution which 
it was not possible for the Convention by the 
terms of its reference to suggest. In a leader, 
declining on behalf of the Sinn Fein Party to par- 
ticipate in the proceedings. Nationality said, 
" Ignoring the Convention which is called into 
[261] 



being only to distract Ireland from the objective 
now before her, to confuse her thought, and to 
permit England to misrepresent her character and 
her claims to Europe, Sinn Fein summons Ire- 
land to concentrate her mind and energy on prep- 
aration for the Peace Conference, where, citing 
the pledges given to the world by Russia, the 
United States, and England's Allies, it will in- 
voke that tribunal to judge between our country 
and her oppressor and claim that the verdict 
which has restored Poland to independent nation- 
hood shall also be registered for Ireland." The 
Executive of Sinn Fein also formally and unani- 
mously declined to enter the Convention unless 
( I ) the terms of reference left It free to decree 
the complete independence of Ireland; (2) the 
English Government publicly pledged itself to 
the United States and the Powers of Europe to 
ratify the decision of the majority of the Con- 
vention; (3) the Convention consisted of none 
but persons freely elected by adult suffrage in 
Ireland; (4) the treatment of prisoners of war 
was accorded to Irish political prisoners in Eng- 
lish prisons. 

Of these proposals the first would have been 
rejected by the Government, the second by the 
Ulster Party, and the third by the Parliamentary 
Party, which by this time was aware that such a 
method of choosing representatives would leave it 
[262] 



almost without representation. The Govern- 
ment to " create an atmosphere " not merely 
accepted but improved on the fourth condition: 
the pohtical prisoners were released uncondi- 
tionally. It is significant of the way in which 
" atmospheres " are created in Ireland that 
though the prisoners were released uncondition- 
ally on June 17th, a meeting held in Dublin to 
demand their release, on June loth, was pro- 
hibited by Proclamation, and an attempt to hold 
it ended in a riot in which a policeman was killed. 
While the Convention was preparing to per- 
form the duties which were to end in nothing, 
Sinn Fein was engaged in the task of rallying 
the country to its side. The death of Major 
Willie Redmond had created a vacancy in East 
Clare: the Parliamentary Party had selected its 
candidate to succeed him: but in little over a 
month after the release of the prisoners Mr. de 
Valera, who had been sentenced to penal servi- 
tude for his share in the Rising, was elected by 
an overwhelming majority. The leader " To 
the Men of Clare " in which, the week before 
the election. Nationality recommended him to 
the electors, was suppressed by the Censor. Dur- 
ing the same month another vacancy occurred 
by the death of the member for Kilkenny City, 
and as a preliminary to the election the authorities 
suppressed the Kilkenny People, the editor of 
[263] 



which was chairman of the convention called to 
select a Sinn Fein candidate, who was promptly- 
returned. Some idea of the appeals which Sinn 
Fein was making to the electors may be gathered 
from the leader " To the Electors, Traders and 
Taxpayers of Kilkenny," in which Nationality 
urged the return of its candidate. It began with 
a quotation from a memorandum addressed in 
1799 to Mr. Pitt by Under-Secretary Cooke, 
" The Union is the only means of preventing Ire- 
land from becoming too great and too powerful," 
and by a quotation from another memorandum 
to the same statesman, " By giving the Irish a 
hundred members in an assembly of six hundred 
and fifty they will be impotent to operate upon 
that assembly, but it will be invested with Irish 
assent to its authority." Figures were given of 
the value of the trade between Great Britain and 
a number of countries in 19 14, the trade with 
Ireland being nearly as valuable as that with the 
United States, twice that with France and nearly 
twice that with Germany. It went on: "It 
will be seen that with the exception of the United 
States, England has no customer nearly as big as 
Ireland. . . . England has had the market to 
herself for generations; Sinn Fein proposes that 
England should not continue to monopolize that 
market longer. Ireland has £150,000,000 worth 
of trade to do yfith the world each year, £135,- 
[264] 



000,000 of which is restricted to England. In 
return for part of that trade the other countries 
of Europe would gladly give Ireland facilities in 
their markets and Ireland would compel England 
to pay competitive prices. ... So long as Ire- 
land sends members to the English Parliament 
and relies upon that institution, England will 
plunder Ireland's revenues and monopolize Ire- 
land's trade at her own price." 

Meanwhile the growing popularity of Sinn 
Fein was leading to a revival of the Irish Vol- 
unteers. Drilling was resumed and, though fre- 
quent arrests were made and the Government de- 
clared its intention at all costs of putting it down, 
it became more and more popular. Irish Vol- 
unteers even took possession of the streets of 
Dublin, in defiance of military orders, and kept 
the line of the procession on the occasion of the 
funeral of Thomas Ashe who had died as the 
result of forcible feeding and inattention in 
Mountjoy Prison. Though Sinn Fein held itself 
distinct from the Volunteer Organization it did 
not refuse to extend some indirect assistance. It 
printed a letter of Mr. Devlin's, addressed from 
the House of Commons in July, 1916, to a cor- 
respondent, which was " captured " and read to a 
Convention of the National Volunteers in Dublin 
in August, 19 1 7. In the letter Mr. Devlin had 
discouraged the importation of arms into Ireland 

[265] 



for the National Volunteers, some of whom had 
assisted the troops in keeping order during the 
week of the Rising. This was of course intended 
to discredit Mr. Devlin in the eyes of the 
National Volunteers whose continued allegiance 
to the Parliamentary Party was now open to 
grave suspicion. In fact the prospect of their 
junction with the Irish Volunteers, a highly 
significant indication of the trend of opinion, de- 
cided the Government to disarm them. On the 
morning of the 15 th August every place in which 
the National Volunteers had stored their arms 
was raided by the mihtary. The only outcome 
of this action, combined with the steady and ob- 
stinate refusal to seize the arms of the Ulster 
Volunteers (the only political party in Ireland 
now left in possession of arms), was to alienate 
any sympathy remaining for the Government in 
the ranks of the National Volunteers. Had 
there been the least pretense of impartiality 
shown it might have been otherwise : but to dis- 
arm all Nationalists of any shade of national 
politics, while designedly and openly leaving the 
Unionists armed to the teeth, was a proof, now 
indeed hardly necessary, of the insincerity of 
official professions. The disarming of all sec- 
tions of Nationalists gave an excuse for the prac- 
tice of raiding for arms which now became com- 
mon and often led to deplorable results. Inno- 

[266] 



cent people were killed, either designedly or by 
accident, and the blame for the murders was laid 
upon the shoulders of Sinn Fein. When a re- 
turn to the policy of physical force seemed threat- 
ened some of the ecclesiastical authorities took 
alarm, and issued warnings against breaches of 
the law of God and resistance to constituted au- 
thority. Murder was of course never counte- 
nanced by Sinn Fein: but as regards resistance 
to constituted authority, there were two sides to 
the question and Sinn Fein was not at all in- 
clined to allow the ecclesiastical authorities to 
dictate its policy. Cardinal Logue might de- 
clare that the Sinn Fein program was insane, but 
it was persisted In without regard to his opinion. 
Sinn Fein was always jealous of ecclesiastical in- 
terference : it welcomed gladly the cooperation of 
ecclesiastics as Irishmen, but It was determined 
to keep Its own policy in its own hands. 

While the Government Convention was sitting 
behind closed doors Sinn Fein decided to hold a 
Convention of its own, consisting of delegates 
freely elected by Sinn Fein Clubs throughout the 
country, and to lay its proceedings and conclusions 
before the country. The Convention met on 
November i and unanimously elected Mr. de 
Valera as the President of Sinn Fein, a position 
which Mr. Griffith had held for six years. The 
election was significant : it meant on the one hand 
[267] 



that Sinn Fein thus silently and without any for- 
mal repudiation of Its previous constitutional atti- 
tude accepted the Republican program: it meant 
on the other hand that the party of the Rising 
now publicly and officially accepted the Sinn Fein 
policy and program as distinct from the policy of 
armed insurrection. Mr. de Valera had already 
in a reply to the warnings of the bishops denied 
that another Rising was in contemplation : he had 
also in a speech at Bailieboro' (28th October, 
19 17), replied to the kindred charge of pro-Ger- 
manism: "The Sinn Fein Party were said to 
be pro^Germans, but if the Germans came to 
Ireland to hold it those who are now resisting 
English power would be the first to resist the 
Germans." The Constitution adopted by the 
Convention sets out at great length the policy 
and objects of Sinn Fein: its solution of the con- 
stitutional problem is as follows : " Sinn Fein 
aims at securing the international recognition of 
Ireland as an independent Irish Republic. Hav- 
ing achieved that status the Irish people may by 
referendum freely choose their own form of gov- 
ernment. This object shall be attained through 
the Sinn Fein Organization which shall in the 
name of the sovereign Irish People (a) deny the 
right and oppose the will of the British Parlia- 
ment or British Crown or any other foreign Gov- 
ernment to legislate for Ireland; (b) make use 
[268] 



of any and every means available to render Im- 
potent the power of England to hold Ireland in 
subjection by military force or otherwise. And 
whereas no law made without the authority and 
consent of the Irish people is, or ever can be, 
binding on the Irish people, therefore in accord- 
ance with the resolution of Sinn Fein, adopted in 
Convention, 1905, a Constituent Assembly shall 
be convoked, comprising persons chosen by the 
Irish constituencies, as the supreme national au- 
thority to speak and act in the name of the Irish 
people and to devise and formulate measures for 
the welfare of the whole people of Ireland." 
It will be noticed that the status of an independent 
Republic is claimed not because Republicanism 
Is the Ideal polity, but because such a status will 
leave Ireland free to choose either that or any 
other form of government; further that the new 
movement expressly links itself to the Sinn Fein 
of pre-war days by a formal recognition of its 
Identity with it and by the express adoption of 
its methods; and lastly that the means by which 
Independence Is to be achieved are defined as 
" any and every means available," the party being 
pledged neither to nor against any particular 
method. 

One of the methods upon which Sinn Fein now 
relied to achieve success was not the method of 
its earlier years. This was frankly acknowl- 
[269] 



edged by its leaders. In an article on the Con- 
vention summoned by Count Plunkett to meet In 
the Mansion House In Dublin after his election 
for North Roscommon, New Ireland (which was 
next to Nationality the leading Sinn Fein weekly) 
wrote as follows: " In the years 1903-19 lo the 
policy of Sinn Fein was a poHcy of self-reliance 
in the strictest sense of that term. It directed 
us away from Westminster and towards Ireland. 
It was revolutionary inasmuch as it sought to 
displace existing British institutions and substitute 
Irish Institutions to which the Irish people would 
respond. . . . The newer Sinn Fein is not quite 
the same as the old: it varies in one essential 
characteristic. Whereas the old Sinn Fein di- 
rected the Irish people towards self-improvement 
as a basis of national strength and made It quite 
plain to us that many sacrifices might possibly 
be demanded, there Is no trace in the newer Sinn 
Fein of these qualities. The older Sinn Fein 
deprecated the reliance upon any external source 
of strength and urged upon us the advantages of 
self-reliance and passive resistance. The new 
Sinn Fein places some of Its faith at least In ex- 
ternal bodies and does not inculcate the older 
doctrine of self-reliance and passive resistance. 
It is not, however, Sinn Fein that has changed 
so much as the world forces that condition such 
changes. The old pohcy flourished in a period 

[270] 



of world peace and was in consequence disposed 
rather towards a long drawn out struggle: the 
new policy is specially devised to take advantage 
of the present temporary state of affairs." This 
may not be very carefully worded, and it is cer- 
tain that Sinn Feiners as a body would not have 
accepted it as a complete and accurate statement 
of the change in the Sinn Fein program: but it is 
a statement (although a careless statement) by 
a Sinn Fein paper of an important fact — that 
an appeal to the Peace Conference was not an 
exercise of " self-reliance " but the adoption for 
the time of a totally different policy. It was 
in effect an admission, not that the policy of self- 
reliance was a failure, but that it had not yet 
been a success and was not so likely to be success- 
ful in the immediate future as an appeal for out- 
side understanding and sympathy. The Parlia- 
mentarians had appealed to the sympathy and 
justice of England: Sinn Fein had declared such 
an appeal to be futile and had refused to join 
in it. It was now prepared to issue its own 
appeal for help and justice not to England but to 
the Peace Conference. Ever since the Rising the 
interaction of the two Nationalist parties upon 
each other's policy had become more and more 
marked, though they still maintained to one an- 
other an attitude of hostility and contempt. If 
Sinn Fein seemed to change (at any rate for the 
[271] 



time) its policy of strict self-reliance into one of 
an appeal for outside assistance, the Parliamen- 
tary Party had shown a disposition no longer to 
rely upon appeals to Enghsh parties and to the 
English Parliament but to call upon a wider au- 
dience to judge its cause. While they still dif- 
fered upon nearly every other point, they were 
agreed in this, that to appeal to the Government 
of 19 1 7 was a waste of time. The appeal to 
the Peace Conference was destined to fall upon 
deaf ears but this was not at the time believed 
to be possible. The Allied statesmen seemed to 
be committed beyond any possibility of denial or 
evasion to " the rights of small nations," " gov- 
ernment by the consent of the governed " and 
other formulae of national freedom. In reply 
to cynical suggestions that these formulae might 
possibly be discovered to be (to the regret of 
their authors) inconsistent with the " realities " 
of politics, New Ireland simply answered: " We 
frankly admit that we have faith and hope in 
the force of the great moral principle of justice 
to the nations and in its ultimate power of bring- 
ing back order to the chaos and tragedy of 
Europe and of imposing itself upon reaction- 
aries." 

But as a matter of fact, in spite of the energy 
with which the idea of an appeal to the Peace 
Conference was taken up and discussed, in spite 
[272] 



even of such sweeping statements as that quoted 
above from New Ireland, Sinn Fein had at most 
agreed to graft a new and temporary policy on 
to the old stem. It still inculcated self-reliance, 
the education of the Irish people in questions of 
national economics, national finance and national 
policy: it still urged the employment of all the 
means which could be employed by Irishmen in 
Ireland to enforce and secure national independ- 
ence. The columns of New Ireland itself make 
this perfectly plain; and even in later references 
in that paper to the appeal to the Peace Con- 
ference and the hopes founded upon it, the edi- 
torial language is much less sweeping than when 
the idea was fresh in its fascination. The con- 
centration of thought upon the Peace Conference 
was also exercising in another direction a modi- 
fying influence upon Sinn Fein. The old idea 
of the independence of Ireland was being grad- 
ually enlarged. It was no longer confined to the 
purely negative idea of freedom from foreign 
control: it assumed the more positive form of 
an Ireland entering its place in a great commu- 
nity of European nations, equally free and mu- 
tually dependent, bound to each other for the 
preservation of liberty and civilization. It was 
hoped that the appeal to the Peace Conference 
would result in the recognition of Ireland not 
merely as a nation to which the Conference was 
[273] 



bound to see justice done, but as a brother and 
comrade in a new European Confederation for 
the advancement of democratic freedom. In 
this, Sinn Fein (though the fact is often ob- 
scured) merely represents the form, molded by 
special conditions, which an aspiration common to 
many of the democracies of Europe, had assumed 
in Ireland. 

The winter of 19 17-18 gave Sinn Fein an op- 
portunity to show that the policy of " self-re- 
liance " had not been abandoned entirely. Dur- 
ing that winter the shadow of famine hung over 
Europe and every nation was engaged in the 
effort to avert it from its own shores by rigid 
conservation and economy of its food supply. 
From Ireland, under the final control of the Eng- 
lish authorities, food continued to be exported 
recklessly. Cattle, oats and butter were shipped 
in large quantities to England, though it was 
known that the food supply of Ireland would 
barely suffice for its own necessities till the middle 
of summer. The independent and Labor mem- 
bers of the Irish Food Control Committee pro- 
tested against this: but, being a purely advisory 
body and subject to the English Food Controller, 
the Committee found that all their advice was 
overruled (as one of the members put it) "by 
the man higher up." The independent members 
resigned in disgust, leaving the work of the comv 

[274] 



mittee to the officials. Sinn Fein began at once 
to organize an unofficial food census of Ireland: 
members of the Sinn Fein Clubs were invited to 
put at the disposal of the central organization 
their local knowledge of the food supplies of 
their immediate neighborhood. It was the first 
opportunity on a large scale which the Republican 
organization had to show what its powers and 
capabilities were and what body of real support 
it had in the country. The Chief Council (Ard- 
Chomhairle) of Sinn Fein called upon producers 
of, and dealers in, necessary foodstuffs to 
" cooperate in the imperative duty of saving Irish 
people from starvation by selling only to buyers 
for exclusive Irish use " : it urged the workers in 
the country, on the railways and at the ports, to 
refuse to cooperate in the exportation of food and 
called upon the public to treat food exporters as 
common enemies. The Food Committee estab- 
lished by the Sinn Fein Council sent circulars to 
the clergy of all denominations soliciting their 
help both in conserving the food supply and in 
making suitable arrangements for its distribution. 
It was not very easy either to secure a food census 
or to induce those who made money by the export 
of food to forego their profits. The principal 
export of potatoes was from Antrim, Down, 
Derry and Tyrone, counties in which Sinn Fein 
had very little prospect either of getting the req- 

[275] 



uisite Information from the farmers or of Induc- 
ing them to forego their profits. English dealers 
were willing to pay large prices for Irish pro- 
duce and Irish farmers were apparently willing 
to go on selling until, as New Ireland put It, there 
would be nothing left In Ireland to eat except 
bank notes. The situation was in all essentials 
what it had been during the closing years of the 
eighteenth century when (as Arthur O'Connor 
pointed out) Ireland was supplying the belliger- 
ents of Europe with food and leaving her own 
population to starve, while the traders waxed 
wealthy. The only difference was that, the in- 
ducement then being a bounty paid by Parlia- 
ment on exported corn, the Inducement now was 
a bounty paid by the purchaser in England in the 
form of an enhanced price. It was a situation 
which, as the Labor Party was quick to point 
out, could not be met by any unofficial organiza- 
tion however energetic, such as the Sinn Fein 
Food Committee, but required official action. 
The Labor Party demanded that the Irish Food 
Control Committee should be strengthened and 
vested with executive powers, no longer remain- 
ing subordinate to the London Controller: until 
this was done, private or unofficial advice or ac- 
tion was merely playing with the question. 
Whether Sinn Fein exerted any but a slight In- 
fluence on the export of food may be doubted; 
[276] 



but it certainly managed the other part of its 
task — the distribution of the available supplies 
— with a certain skill. Measures were concerted 
for purchasing supplies in counties where food 
was relatively abundant and sending it to agents 
in districts where it was scarce. The usual 
abuses which attend attempts to supply food to a 
poor population could not, of course, be entirely 
eliminated, but on the whole the experiment seems 
to have been generally successful. In Ennis, for 
instance, the local Sinn Fein Club established a 
Sinn Fein market to which farmers brought their 
potatoes: the club purchased them at the current 
price and distributed them to 150 poor families 
at cost : each family was provided with a card 
endorsed with the quantity of potatoes necessary 
for its needs and on presentation of the card 
received the potatoes. The scheme was financed 
by some prominent men in Ennis who advanced 
the necessary capital, the Sinn Fein Club being 
at the cost of the working expenses of the scheme : 
there was " no credit and no charity." Although 
this and similar schemes worked fairly well, and 
undoubtedly relieved the situation appreciably in 
many districts, they were open to the objection 
brought by the Labor Party that they were in- 
effective as compared both with genuine coopera- 
tive effort on the part of the people themselves 
and with official action taken by the County Coun- 

[277] 



cils or municipal authorities. They were, besides, 
likely to give rise to the question which Irish 
Opinion (the Irish Labor weekly) put " Is the 
object political or economic?" There is no 
doubt that the fact that Sinn Fein was actively 
promoting measures of relief, while official action 
tended to produce a situation approaching to 
famine, was used as an argument in favor of the 
Sinn Fein policy in general. It was hardly to be 
expected either that Sinn Feiners should not use 
the argument or that the public should not think 
that there was something in it. The Labor 
Party's criticisms were, from the economic point 
of view, perfectly sound. An Irish Food Control 
Committee with executive powers, authority in 
the hands of locally-elected bodies to conserve 
and distribute local supplies of food, was ideally 
the proper scheme : but the proper scheme was, 
as usual, unattainable and Sinn Fein was doing 
what was perhaps the only thing that could be 
done under the circumstances. And though the 
Labor Party urged its criticisms, it did not with- 
hold its assistance and hearty support to the Sinn 
Fein scheme. 

The result was to increase the growing popu- 
larity of Sinn Fein. It was seen that it had an- 
other than the purely political aspect, that its 
principles of self-reliance were capable of being 
applied with a success limited only by the amount 
[278] 



of popular support which they could command. 
It was, at any rate, plain that if the people who 
controlled the food supplies were all believers in 
Sinn Fein principles there need be no prospect of 
famine in Ireland, and the action of Sinn Fein 
(inadequate though it may have been) at any rate 
contrasted favorably with the indifference and in- 
efficiency of the official bodies appointed by the 
Government and with the helplessness of other 
political parties. 

The popularity of Sinn Fein was further in- 
creased by the continued activities of the Irish 
police authorities against its more prominent or 
active adherents. If the Cabinet had decided to 
create an *' atmosphere " for the Convention by 
the release of the prisoners sentenced to penal 
servitude for their share in the Rising, an opposite 
" atmosphere " was being systematically gener- 
ated by the Irish Executive. People were being 
arrested all over the country for offenses incom- 
parably less serious from every point of view 
than those committed by the people who had been 
released. The conclusion was drawn that the 
Government, while anxious to make a display to 
the world of impartiality and good will by a 
spectacular act of clemency, was in reality deter- 
mined to regard the active support of Sinn Fein 
as a serious offense in the case of men too little 
before the eyes of the world for their arrest to 

[279] 



lead to widespread comment or indignation. 
Their action was held to be an Indication of their 
resolve to prevent the spread of Sinn Fein prin- 
ciples until the Convention should have presented 
a report palatable to the Cabinet: and Sinn Fein 
instead of suffering by this action simply grew in 
its own esteem and In the eyes of others. 

The result of the South Armagh Election early 
In 19 1 8, In which Its candidate was defeated, only 
spurred Sinn Fein to further exertions. The elec- 
tion indicated more a desire " to give the Con- 
vention a chance " than a deliberate judgment of 
the electorate in favor of the Parliamentary as 
against the Sinn Fein policy. But a " chance 
given " to the Convention was in reality an oppor- 
tunity denied to Sinn Fein. The Convention was 
to produce a scheme for the government of Ire- 
land " within the Empire." A tolerable and 
workable scheme produced unanimously (or 
nearly so) by the Convention would undoubtedly 
(or so it was thought) have to be accepted by 
the Cabinet; if such a scheme were accepted and 
put Into operation, the feeling of relief in Ire- 
land would have been so deep and so general as 
to deal to Sinn Fein, just when it was beginning 
to gain the ear of the country, a blow from which 
it might take long to recover, if it should recover 
it for a generation. It was felt that a Sinn Fein 
victory in South Armagh would mean that the 
[280] 



Convention might for all practical purposes ad- 
journ indefinitely, while a victory for the Par- 
liamentary Party meant that it was given the 
opportunity, so far as Nationalist Ireland repre- 
sented by this constituency was concerned, of pro- 
ducing a scheme of self-government wide enough 
to win the support of all Irishmen really desirous 
of a reasonable step in advance. 

Sinn Fein decided in the circumstances to put 
the real opinion of Ireland on the question of 
independence to a definite test before the Conven- 
tion should have time to report in favor of some- 
thing attractive to moderate men. If offered, but 
falling short of independence. On St. Patrick's 
Day " monster meetings " were held all over Ire- 
land, attended by the Volunteers who mustered in 
force and by crowds which were certainly enthusi- 
astic. At all of these meetings the following 
resolution was put in Irish and in English and, 
according to the reports, passed everywhere with 
practical unanimity: "Here on St. Patrick's 
Day we join with our fellow-countrymen at home 
and in foreign lands In proclaiming once more 
that Ireland is a distinct nation whose just right 
is sovereign Independence. This right has been 
asserted in every generation, has never been sur- 
rendered and never allowed to lapse. We call 
the nations to witness that to-day as in the past 
it is by force alone that England holds Ireland 
[281] 



for her Empire and not by the consent of the 
Irish; and that England's claim to have given the 
Irish people ' self-determination ' Is a lie : her 
true attitude being shown by the recent ministerial 
statement that ' under no circumstances could any 
English Government contemplate the ultimate in- 
dependence of Ireland.' " In Dublin, Belfast and 
Clare these meetings were proclaimed and could 
not be held — at least on the appointed day. In 
Belfast Mr. de Valera addressed the meeting at 
1 1 o'clock on the night preceding, but when mid- 
night struck the gathering was dispersed by the 
police. But a " monster meeting " Is a thing of 
varying dimensions: even "monster meetings" 
held simultaneously all over Ireland may not be 
attended by more than a fraction of the popula- 
tion. To put the matter beyond doubt it was 
decided to institute a plebiscite In favor of inde- 
pendence and to publish the numbers who in each 
towr.land declared themselves in favor of it. 
While the plebiscite was being taken Sinn Fein 
had again an opportunity of " testing the feeling 
of the country " at a parliamentary election. Mr. 
John Redmond had died on the 6th of March. 
He had fought for his policy to the last with 
tenacity and dignity: through a long life he had 
displayed the courage which once led the small 
and faithful band who refused to betray Parnell : 
he had come to accept the limitations imposed 
[282] 



upon his policy by English feeling with a pride 
which preferred to regard them as the dictates 
of statesmanship : he never lost his courtesy, his 
confidence or his belief in human sincerity. To 
Sinn Fein he had opposed an unbending hostility, 
and the temptation to replace him in the represen- 
tation of Waterford by a Sinn Feiner was too 
great to be resisted. Sinn Fein sustained a heavy 
defeat at the poll, and this second reverse within 
a few months was taken to indicate the turning 
of the tide in favor of Mr. Redmond's policy. 
It really meant no more than that the electors of 
Waterford thought, what many other people 
thought with them, that the attempt to oust Mr. 
Redmond's son from sitting for his father's con- 
stituency was a breach of the decencies of public 
life. Certainly the language which some of the 
party used in speaking of Mr. Redmond was in- 
excusable and deserved the rebuff which it re- 
ceived. 

But the report of the Convention, laid upon 
the table of the House of Commons early in 
April, overshadowed plebiscites and the results 
of contested elections. Upon its reception by the 
Government the whole future of Ireland seemed 
to turn. But the report was difficult to master. 
The Chairman of the Convention claimed that it 
had " laid a foundation of Irish agreement un- 
precedented in history," but the actual record of 
[283] 



the proceedings seemed at first blush open to a 
somewhat different interpretation. The Nation- 
alists had, it is true, offered large concessions 
to the Unionists, but they were themselves di- 
vided upon questions of principle of the very first 
importance; and while some of the Unionists were 
content to accept what was offered, provided the 
Nationalists met the concession of this acceptance 
by a concession infinitely greater, the Ulster 
Unionists appeared to have succeeded in com- 
mitting themselves to nothing. If the Govern- 
ment were to attempt to legislate for Ireland on 
the basis of the report the Ulster Unionists were 
certain to produce the " pledges " that they would 
not be " coerced " and too many responsible peo- 
ple had given these pledges to make the prospect 
of legislation for Ireland a comfortable outlook 
for anybody. But not only was the report diffi- 
cult to interpret, not only did its publication put 
Ministers in an awkward position: it came at a 
most unfortunate time. The military prospects 
of the Allies were clouded, and the Government 
had decided to make a fresh call upon the man- 
power of the country. It was known that in their 
perplexity they had considered the possibility of 
extending Conscription to Ireland, and to do so, 
equally with refraining from doing so, seemed to 
be a step of doubtful expediency. 

The situation was complicated; but the hand- 
[284] 



ling of It by the Prime Minister was more com- 
plicated still. He elected to treat the question 
of Home Rule and the question of Irish Con- 
scription concurrently while he declared that they 
were not interdependent. He justified the appli- 
cation of Conscription to Ireland on the merits: 
men were needed In France and there were men to 
be had In Ireland: the Home Rule Act accepted 
by the Parliamentary Party and placed on the 
Statute Book, had given to Parliament the right 
to legislate for Ireland upon matters of Imperial 
concern. As for the Convention, he refused to 
regard the report as disclosing that there had 
been " substantial agreement," nevertheless he 
announced that the Government would bring for- 
ward immediately such proposals for the future 
government of Ireland as seemed to be just. It 
was common belief that so far as the Convention 
was concerned a failure to arrive at *' substantial 
agreement " absolved the Government from all 
obligation to legislate upon its proposals; an in- 
tention of legislating all the same appeared to 
be prompted by the desire to offer something in 
the way of compensation for the unpalatable pro- 
posal of Conscription. But the Premier Insisted 
that any such Interpretation of his proposal was 
erroneous: the two measures had nothing what- 
ever to do with one another : each stood upon its 
own merits and each must be passed regardless 
[285] 



of the other. But, having elected to take Con- 
scription first, and having announced his intention 
of forcing It through Parliament in spite of crit- 
icism and of putting it Into operation In Ire- 
land in spite of opposition, he indulged himself 
in a glimpse at the prospects of a con- 
scripted Ireland: "when the young men of Ire- 
land," he said, " have been brought In large num- 
bers into the fighting line, it Is Important that 
they should feel that they are not fighting for 
the purpose of establishing a principle abroad 
which Is denied to them at home." But as if in 
fear that this might imply some remote connec- 
tion between Ireland's duty to fight and Ireland's 
right to be given the benefit of the principle it 
was asked to fight for, the Premier gave the most 
convincing proof of his sincerity in saying that 
Conscription for Ireland and Home Rule for Ire- 
land did not " stand together " — Conscription 
was passed Into law and Home Rule was dropped. 
It is difficult to conceive a course of action more 
nicely calculated to demonstrate on a large scale 
the principal theses which Sinn Fein had been 
preaching for years. The demonstration was 
carried into every household in Ireland in a form 
in which it could no longer be ignored. Con- 
scription had not been a palatable measure in 
England, and It had not been put into force until 
the English people had agreed with practical 
[2861 



unanimity that they must submit to it: but the 
choice had been their own and no Government 
would have ventured even to propose it until the 
English people had made up their minds before- 
hand to accept it when it should be proposed. In 
Australia it had been discussed and rejected; and 
no one either in England or anywhere else had 
questioned the right of the people of Australia to 
dechne to conscribe themselves, though the in- 
terests of Australia were as vitally involved in 
the issue of the war as the interests of England, 
Ireland, on the other hand, while it was opposed 
to Conscription, had no choice offered to it in the 
matter. It was decided upon by a Cabinet of 
which no Irishman was a member and it was to 
be enforced in spite not merely of the protests of 
Ireland but of the grave warnings of a large 
number of Englishmen. To the argument that 
Ireland, being an integral part of the United 
Kingdom, must submit to the legislation of Parlia- 
ment whether it hked it or no, it was pointed out 
that this argument had not been enforced against 
Ulster four years before; that when Conscription 
had first been enforced in England it had been 
admitted by Parliament that Ireland was a special 
case; that to assert that Ireland was an integral 
part of the United Kingdom was to beg the very 
question in dispute, since the national claim of 
Ireland had always been a claim for independ- 
[287] 



ence. Again, If the Home Rule Act was relied 
upon (as the Premier relied upon It) to prove 
that Ireland had accepted the authority of Parlia- 
ment in Imperial matters and acknowledged Its 
supreme jurisdiction In all matters pertaining to 
war and peace, It was pointed out that the Gov- 
ernment which now Invoked it had persistently- 
refused to put it Into operation. Yet the 
Premier, who, more than any other single man, 
had shown himself hostile In deed, while friendly 
In word, to Irish claims, himself admitted that 
Irishmen serving in the army In the then con- 
dition of Irish affairs would be fighting abroad 
to enforce a principle denied In the government 
of their own country. The conclusion which Sinn 
Fein drew was that the English Government was 
prepared In defiance of public feeling, justice and 
constitutional practice to enforce Conscription 
upon Ireland by naked force: that it had no In- 
tention of granting Ireland any form of self-gov- 
ernment, and that it was the duty of Irishmen to 
organize " an effective and protracted resistance." 
But, though prepared to resist, it continued to 
argue. It pointed out that the Irish Parliament, 
whose powers had been transferred by the Act 
of Union to the Parliament of England, had 
possessed no power of Conscription and could not 
transfer a power which it did not possess; any 
power of Conscription, therefore, possessed by 
[288] 



Parliament over Ireland must rest upon some 
other basis, If it existed at all: that there was no 
legal process by which a man could be deprived 
of life or liberty except on conviction for a crime: 
and that this was why, even in the case of Con- 
scription in England, Mr. Asquith, a good con- 
stitutional lawyer, " was careful to declare that 
he based the conscription of Enghshmen on the 
basis, not of State duty or compulsion, but of the 
universal assent of the English people." If this 
assent was lacking, as it undoubtedly was, in the 
case of Ireland, it followed that to enforce Con- 
scription was an act of naked injustice. 

But no elaborate argument was needed to rouse 
a people convinced at last that they were in the 
vortex of Charybdis. They resented what now 
appeared as the duplicity with which for months 
their attention had been deliberately and elabo- 
rately focussed upon the alluring mysteries of the 
Convention while they drifted quietly and securely 
towards the edge of the whirlpool. They saw 
the cloudy structure of the Convention melt and 
float away, disclosing what it had covered; and 
they prepared for a desperate struggle. 

The feeling was not confined to Sinn Fein. 
The Parliamentary Party left Westminster In a 
body and crossed to Ireland to help in the national 
resistance. The Labor Party joined hands with 
them and with Sinn Fein in the universal crisis. 
[289] 



It Involved for the Parliamentary Party a tragic 
and fatal break with the past. It was the end of 
all their hopes, of all their influence, of their 
very existence; and as they joined the Sinn Fein 
and Labor representatives round the table of the 
Mansion House Conference, summoned by the 
Lord Mayor of Dublin, they must have felt that 
they were invited by virtue of what they had 
once been rather than by virtue of what they 
were; they were there as the men who had relied 
on the broken reed, " whereon if a man lean it 
will go into his hand and pierce him." 

After Its first meeting on April i8th, the Man- 
sion House Conference issued the following dec- 
laration: — " Taking our stand on Ireland's sepa- 
rate and distinct nationhood and affirming the 
principle of liberty that the Governments of na- 
tions derive their just powers from the consent of 
the governed, we deny the right of the British 
Government or any external authority to impose 
compulsory military service in Ireland against the 
clearly expressed will of the Irish people. The 
passing of the Conscription Bill by the British 
House of Commons must be regarded as a dec- 
laration of war on the Irish nation. The alter- 
native to accepting it as such is to surrender our 
liberties and to acknowledge ourselves slaves. It 
is in direct violation of the rights of small na- 
tionalities to self-determination, which even the 
[290] 



Prime Minister of England — now preparing to 
employ naked militarism and force his Act upon 
Ireland — himself officially announced as an es- 
sential condition for peace at the Peace Congress. 
The attempt to enforce it will be an unwarrant- 
able aggression, which we call upon all Irishmen 
to resist by the most effective means at their dis- 
posal." On the same day the Conference decided 
to ask the cooperation of the Irish Catholic 
Bishops who had been summoned by Cardinal 
Logue to meet at Maynooth. The Bishops, after 
hearing a deputation from the Mansion House 
Conference, issued at once the following mani- 
festo : " An attempt is being made to force Con- 
scription on Ireland against the will of the Irish 
nation and in defiance of the protests of its 
leaders. In view especially of the historic rela- 
tions between the two countries from the very 
beginning up to this moment, we consider that 
Conscription forced in this way upon Ireland Is 
an oppressive and inhuman law, which the Irish 
people have a right to resist by every means that 
are consonant with the law of God. We wish 
to remind our people that there Is a higher Power 
which controls the affairs of men. They have 
in their hands the means of conciliating that 
Power by strict adherence to the Divine law, by 
more earnest attention to their religious duties, 
and by fervent and persevering prayer. In or- 
[291] 



der to secure the aid of the Holy Mother of 
God, who shielded our people In the days of 
their greatest trials, we have already sanctioned 
a National Novena in honor of Our Lady of 
Lourdes, commencing on the 3rd May, to secure 
general and domestic peace. We also exhort the 
heads of families to have the Rosary recited every 
evening with the intention of protecting the spir- 
itual and temporal welfare of our beloved coun- 
try and bringing us safe through this crisis of 
unparalleled gravity." 

Many Sinn Feiners sincerely deplored the step 
which the Conference had taken in calling upon 
the Bishops for an official manifesto. Its word- 
ing seemed to rule out of existence the section 
of Irish Nationalists who belonged to the Protest- 
ant faith and to identify a national question with 
a particular creed. Certainly as a mere question 
of tactics the manifesto was of doubtful wisdom. 
It was certain to raise, and it did raise, the cry 
of the " priest in politics." From the mouths 
of the Ulster Party the criticism might be dis- 
regarded, for they had themselves four years be- 
fore induced the Protestant churches in Ulster to 
pass official resolutions against Home Rule. But 
it was different when the English newspapers be- 
gan to raise the " No Popery " cry and to write 
as if Sinn Fein were a purely Catholic party which 
it had never ceased to protest it was not. But 
[292] 



in fact the vexed question of the relation of the 
Church to the civil power, a question not to be 
disposed of in a sentence, did not fairly arise 
from the Bishops' pronouncement. The main 
gist of it was contained in two propositions neither 
of which was theological: the proposition that 
Conscription was an oppressive and inhuman law 
was (whether right or wrong) an ordinary state- 
ment of opinion upon a purely mundane matter : 
the proposition that such a law might be resisted 
by any means consonant with the law of God was 
the statement not of theology, whether Catholic 
or Protestant, but of ordinary ethics, accidentally 
theistic. But the concluding sentences of the 
manifesto threw their light backwards upon the 
essential statements, and the resistance to Con- 
scription was represented as one more incident in 
the long struggle between free institutions and 
the power of the Roman Church. 

Nationalist Ireland, however, needed no incen- 
tive from the Bishops to resist. It was presented 
with a clear cut issue which could not be evaded, 
which the Cabinet by its decision had raised in its 
most acute form. If Ireland submitted quietly 
to Conscription then it acknowledged that it stood 
to the British Parliament in exactly the same re- 
lation as did Yorkshire or Middlesex: if, on the 
other hand, Ireland were a nation, even if it were 
a nation within the British Empire, it had the 
[293] 



right to decide for itself on a question involving 
issues so vital to its future. This was the alter- 
native which Sinn Fein put in vehement and pas- 
sionate language before the country and the reply 
of Nationalist Ireland was practically unanimous. 
Nearly every Nationalist in Ireland took the anti- 
Conscription pledge, " Denying the right of the 
British Government to enforce compulsory service 
in this country, we pledge ourselves solemnly to 
one another to resist Conscription by the most 
effective means at our disposal." 

But not only was the intention of the Govern- 
ment to enforce Conscription regarded as a chal- 
lenge to Ireland, as a denial of its nationality; 
a deeper purpose was supposed to lie behind it. 
The record of the Government during the war 
in its dealings with Ireland had not been such 
as to persuade Nationalists of any section that it 
was either friendly or sincere. It was believed 
that, coupled with the desire to obtain recruits, 
and the intention of treating the Irish claim to a 
national existence as a thing of no consequence 
in order to secure them, there was the desire 
further to deplete Ireland of its Nationalist 
population and render its government by England 
easier in consequence. This belief did not always 
find public expression, but it existed and had much 
to do with the vehemence of the resistance. 
Apart from this consideration, the motives of the 
[294] 



opposition and the feelings with which it was 
connected were succinctly given by New Ireland. 
" At the basis of the opposition to Conscription 
stand the moral rights of Ireland, the very rock 
as it were of Irish nationality, the rights to choose 
her own future and to protect her people from 
the horrors of the European War. If there were 
any statesmanship left in England to-day it would 
look to creating harmony between Ireland and 
England, knowing that the real interest of na- 
tions is built thereon. Real statesmanship would 
grant Ireland the fullest liberty, knowing that 
the friendship of Ireland is essential, and that 
it can only be based on the fundamentals of na- 
tional honor, namely, liberty and justice. In- 
stead English pohticians vainly imagine that 
coercion, the press gang, and the train of con- 
sequent tragedy will somehow win the allegiance 
and support of Ireland." 

The most spectacular demonstration of protest 
was made by the Irish Labor Party. A con- 
ference of fifteen hundred delegates convened in 
Dublin by the Irish Trades Union Congress, in 
adopting a resolution to resist Conscription " in 
every way that to us seems feasible," asserting 
" our claims for independent status as a nation in 
the international movement and the right of self- 
determination as a nation as to what action or 
actions our people should take on questions of 
[295] 



political or economic issues," called upon Irish 
workers to abstain from all work on April 23rd 
as " a demonstration of fealty to the cause of 
Labor and Ireland." This was the first occasion 
in Western Europe on which it had been decided 
to call a general national strike: and the strike 
in Ireland was general except in Northeast Ulster. 
The Labor Party however had a point of view 
somewhat different from that of Sinn Fein. La- 
bor was opposed to Conscription on principle, 
and would have, unlike Sinn Fein, opposed it even 
if agreed to by an Irish Parliament. Their view 
had been clearly expressed more than a year be- 
fore when, after two years of silence, Irish Labor 
began again to publish a weekly paper. Irish 
Opinion in its first number, published on Decem- 
ber ist, 1917, had said, "We shall resolutely 
oppose the conscription of Irish people, whether 
for military or industrial purposes. The very 
idea of compulsory service is abhorrent to us and 
we shall assist in every way every effort of our 
people to resist the imposition of such an iniq- 
uitous system upon us." 

However neither minor differences on the sub- 
ject of Conscription nor, indeed, major differences 
upon other points, prevented all sections of Na- 
tionalist opinion from assisting each other heartily 
in the crisis. A common statement of Ireland's 
case against Conscription was drawn up for pub- 
[296] 



licatlon and the Lord Mayor of Dublin was 
deputed to proceed to America to lay the protest 
of Ireland before the President of the United 
States. The Government showed no signs of 
yielding to the opposition. The Lord Lieuten- 
ant known to be opposed to the policy of the 
Cabinet was recalled, and his place was taken by 
Field Marshal Lord French with whom Mr. 
Shortt was appointed Chief Secretary, one of a 
considerable number of " English Home Rulers " 
who have at various times been appointed to the 
post of Chief Secretary for Ireland by virtue of 
their profession of the belief that no such post 
should be permitted to exist, and whose conduct 
in it has been such as might be expected from such 
persons. It was announced with official emphasis 
that no opposition would deflect the Government 
from its purpose. The Lord Mayor of Dublin 
was refused permission to leave Ireland until he 
should first have submitted for the approval of 
Lord French the memorial which he was charged 
to convey to the President of the United States. 
But nothing altered the opposition to Conscrip- 
tion, and the Government had to be content with 
the suspension of the sword. 

When the formidable nature of the task they 
had undertaken dawned upon the Lord Lieuten- 
ant and his Chief Secretary, it was decided by the 
Irish Government to cut the sinews of the opposi- 
[297] 



tion by the arrest of those who were chiefly re- 
sponsible for fomenting it. But it was clearly im- 
possible to clap the Catholic Bishops and the 
Mansion House Conference into jail in a body. 
It was plain that Sinn Fein was the chief center 
of the trouble, being the only political party whose 
principles furnished a logical ground for opposi- 
tion to the conscription of Ireland by Act of Par- 
liament. The two Sinn Fein members of the 
Mansion House Conference, Messrs. de Valera 
and Griffith, with a number of less prominent 
Sinn Feiners, were deported and imprisoned. 
But this was a course which required some ex- 
planation. They were not the only people promi- 
nent in the Anti-Conscription campaign; and in 
any case English public opinion while, on the 
whole, indignant with the attitude of Ireland to- 
wards compulsory service, was becoming some- 
what uneasy as to happenings in Ireland and in- 
clined to question the entire wisdom of the Irish 
Executive. Accordingly, it was asserted that the 
arrested Sinn Feiners had been guilty of com- 
plicity in a German plot. The ex-Lord Lieuten- 
ant, Lord Wimborne, during whose tenure of 
office the discovery of the plot (it was said) 
began to be made, publicly and flatly denied all 
knowledge of it, and expressed disbelief in its 
existence. The Premier announced that he had 
seen the evidence (which nothing, however, would 
[298] 



induce him to divulge) and that it was even as the 
Irish Government had said. PubHc opinion how- 
ever was still unsatisfied, and the Irish office is- 
sued a statement on the subject in which the Chief 
Secretary argued (" for even though vanquished 
he could argue still ") from the history of Sinn 
Fein for the previous three or four years, and 
from certain financial transactions between Count 
Bernstorff and some Irish-Americans before 
America entered the war, that some person or 
persons in Ireland had been in communication 
with Germany for a treasonable purpose. How- 
ever that may have been, there was no direct 
evidence connecting any of the prisoners with any 
of these transactions, and in fact nearly all of 
them had been in jail in England at the time when 
the transactions took place. The official state- 
ment was pitilessly analyzed in a pamphlet pub- 
lished by Nezv Ireland entitled " The Plot: Ger- 
man or English?" the only result of the whole 
affair being that official credit in Ireland received 
its last shock. No further attempts were made 
to provide non-political reasons for political 
arrests: it was judged better that the Executive 
should rely upon the extraordinary powers con- 
ferred upon it by the Defense of the Realm Act 
(though the machinery provided by what was 
known as " the ordinary law " in Ireland seemed 
sufficiently complete without it) to arrest, with- 

[299] 



out the necessity of charge or trial, any persons 
who made themselves prominent for the advocacy 
of Sinn Fein or Republican politics. In July Sinn 
Fein, the Gaelic League, Cumann na mBan and 
the Irish Volunteers were declared to be 
" dangerous associations " to which Irish men 
and women would in future belong at their 
own risk. Concerts, hurling matches, literary 
competitions, were prohibited all over Ireland by 
military force when they were held under the 
auspices of persons politically obnoxious to the 
Government. Government became a matter of 
having enough troops in the country to ensure 
that the Executive was able to do precisely what 
it pleased. Ireland was treated frankly as hostile 
and occupied territory, and the last pretense 
of constitutional government was finally aban- 
doned. 

The reply of Sinn Fein to the arrest of Mr. 
Griffith for complicity in the " German Plot " 
had been his triumphant election for East Cavan. 
This was almost the last seat which the once pow- 
erful Parliamentary Party ventured to contest. 
Its cooperation with Sinn Fein in the question of 
Conscription had been, not an alliance but an 
operation conducted in common, and on other 
points each was at perfect liberty to pursue its 
own path. But the junction of forces had only 
succeeded in bringing into clear relief the essen- 
[300] 



tial incompatibility of the Sinn Fein and the Par- 
liamentary policies, and it became evident that 
the Irish public would have to choose definitely 
which it should finally adopt. Sinn Fein, which 
refused to compromise on the essential principle 
of Ireland's distinct and independent nationhood, 
could argue with considerable force that on this 
assumption alone could Ireland object to Con- 
scription with confidence and moral justification 
— that if Ireland were not a nation, but a prov- 
ince or a dependency, then the resistance to Con- 
scription was legally and morally without a sound 
basis. It was extremely difficult for the Parlia- 
mentary Party to counter this argument: and 
in point of fact some of them did not try to 
counter it but frankly dissociated themselves from 
the Anti-Conscription policy. It was perfectly 
clear that the Home Rule Act reserved such 
powers to Parliament as to make the conscription 
of Ireland, as part of a general measure of Con- 
scription for the United Kingdom, a step which 
Parliament would legally be entitled to take and 
which, once the Home Rule Act was accepted by 
Ireland as satisfactory (and the Parliamentary 
Party had declared that it was) Ireland would 
have no moral right to resist. The Party began 
to shift its ground : it could no longer, in view of 
Irish feeling, remain advocates of a settlement 
which made Conscription possible : it would not 

[301] 



go the whole way with Sinn Fein and declare that 
no settlement would be satisfactory which did not 
acknowledge the right of Ireland to independent 
nationhood, to self-determination and the right to 
choose its own form of government. The Party 
settled down unofficially to the advocacy of a form 
of Home Rule which should ensure to Ireland 
piece-meal and in detail, by enactment of Parlia- 
ment, as large an independence as was possessed 
by the self-governing Dominions, without the 
formal and definite renunciation of the right of 
Parliament to decide the extent to which Ireland 
should be independent. This of course left the 
question of principle precisely where it was. But 
on the question of principle Sinn Fein was ada- 
mant, and Nationalist Ireland supported Sinn 
Fein by an overwhelming majority. 

The relationship between Sinn Fein and the 
Hierarchy was more enigmatic and gave rise to 
much speculation. One view was that Sinn Fein 
had " captured " the Hierarchy, another was that 
the Hierarchy had " captured " Sinn Fein. 
Neither view was, of course, correct. Individual 
bishops may have sympathized (individual priests 
certainly sympathized in large numbers) with 
Sinn Fein: but it is certain that quite a large num- 
ber of priests and bishops did not. While it is 
true that resistance to Conscription could not 
logically be justified except upon the principles of 
[302] 



Sinn Fein, bishops had the same right to be 
illogical as members of the Parliamentary Party. 
Under the stress of the moment, in the desire to 
save their flocks from the danger that threatened 
them, they had joined forces with a party which 
before that they had not approved of and which 
they were not bound to approve of afterwards. 
Sinn Fein, at any rate, was under no illusion as 
to the feelings of some of the Bishops. The 
curate of Crossna, Father O'Flanagan, had taken 
a very active part on the side of Sinn Fein in 
the East Cavan election. Shortly afterwards he 
was deprived by his bishop, the Most Rev. Dr. 
Coyne, of all his faculties as a priest, including 
the right to say Mass. The technical offense 
for which he was punished in this way was that 
of having addressed meetings within the bound- 
aries of three parishes in Cavan without first 
obtaining the permission of the local parish 
priests. Everybody knew that the real reason 
for his punishment was not the technical offense 
but the fact that his speeches had been strongly 
(and even violently) Sinn Fein. The people of 
Crossna retorted by shutting up the parish church 
and refusing to allow Mass to be said in it by 
any one else. Nationality, in reporting the facts, 
said of Father OTlanagan: " He has been con- 
demned to the most harsh judgment that can be 
meted out to a priest by his bishop and until that 
[303] 



wrong has been set right Sinn Fein will stand by- 
Father O'Flanagan " ; and practically every Sinn 
Feiner in Ireland agreed with these words. 
When bishops seemed (as many of them did) to 
go out of their way to criticize in pastorals and 
public letters the policy or the tactics of Sinn 
Fein, their action was resented and openly, even 
stringently, criticized in the Sinn Fein papers: 
but all this was done not only without any trace 
of anti-clericahsm (in the proper sense of the 
word) but with what sometimes seemed an almost 
exaggerated deference to the office and sacred 
functions of the bishop as such. As a matter of 
fact the Catholic Church in Ireland during the 
nineteenth century has always been on the side 
of law and order. It has had a strong bias to- 
wards constituted authority, as was to be expected 
from a branch of the most conservative institution 
in the world. It excommunicated the Fenians, it 
opposed the Land League, it condemned the Ris- 
ing. It is hardly too much to say that Ireland 
would have been ungovernable but for the influ- 
ence of the Church. It raised its voice against 
outrage and murder in language beside which the 
denunciations of politicians sound tame and 
flaccid. If it has meddled in politics (as it has) 
it has done no more than the Protestant Churches 
in Ireland, every one of which is " in politics " 
up to the neck. 

[304] 



And the cooperation of Labor and Sinn Fein 
in the opposition to Conscription by no means 
meant either that Labor had become Sinn Fein 
or that Sinn Fein had adopted the Labor pro- 
gram. In fact its relation to Labor is a problem 
which Sinn Fein has been very long in solving. 
The alliance between Republican Volunteers and 
the Citizen Army in the Rising effected no more 
than a temporary and partial union. The very 
first number of Irish Opinion had some very open 
criticism of the attitude of Sinn Fein to Irish 
Labor. The Sinn Fein Convention of November 
1st, 19 17, had passed two Labor resolutions, one 
which affirmed the right of Labor to a " fair and 
reasonable " wage : the other was in favor of 
Irish Labor severing its connection with British 
Trades Unions. On the first of these Irish 
Opinion remarked: " The resolution of the Sinn 
Fein Convention conceding to Irish Labor the 
right to fair and reasonable wages was not by 
any means encouraging. It was a resolution to 
which the assent of even Mr. W. M. Murphy 
might have been secured. It did not go far 
enough, and it bore upon the face of it timidity 
and trepidation. The Labor demand to-day goes 
rather beyond fair and reasonable wages : the 
British Government is prepared to offer, in fact 
has actually offered, some share in direction to 
British Labor. This being so, there is not much 

[305] 



to be gained from Mr. de Valera's statement In 
his Mansion House speech ' that in a free Ireland, 
with the social conditions that obtained in Ire- 
land, Labor had a far better chance than it would 
have in capitalist England.' ' Our Labor policy,' 
continued Mr. de Valera, ' is a policy of a free 
country, and we ask Labor to join with us to free 
the country. We recognize that we can never 
free it without Labor. And we say, when Labor 
frees this country — helps to free it — Labor can 
loog for its own share of its patrimony.' We 
agree that ' to free the country ' is an object 
worthy of all the devotion that men can give to 
it, but at the same time we would urge that pend- 
ing this devoutly-to-be-wished-for consummation, 
men and women must live and rear the families 
upon which the future Ireland depends. What 
Mr. de Valera asks in effect is that Labor should 
wait till freedom is achieved before it claims ' its 
share of its patrimony.' There are free coun- 
tries, even Republics, where Labor claims ' its 
share in its patrimony ' in vain. We can work 
for freedom, and we will, but at the same time 
we'll claim our share of our patrimony when and 
where opportunity offers." This is to put the 
issue squarely. Labor was not going to commit 
itself blindfold to any policy of " ignoring " in- 
discriminately all " English law," when by recog- 
nizing it any practical advantage was to be 

[306] 



gained. Labor had too keen an eye to the reali- 
ties of life to refuse a gift from the left hand 
because the right hand had smitten it or picked 
its pocket. It was prepared to settle its account 
with the owner of both hands when opportunity 
offered, but, for the present, " a man must live." 
" Flesh-pots or Freedom " might form an attrac- 
tive motto for the front page of New Ireland, 
but Labor saw no virtue (since Freedom's back 
was turned anyhow) in leaving the pots untasted 
on a point of honor. The resolution calling upon 
Irish Labor to withdraw from association with 
English Labor was flatly ignored. Irish Labor 
was, and intended to remain, international : it was 
not going to refuse cooperation with Labor in 
France or Belgium — it appointed delegates to 
the Stockholm Conference — and it saw no rea- 
son to refuse cooperation with Labor in England. 
Besides, without the help of English Labor it 
felt unable to stand alone. And Labor, while 
it sympathized with the demand for Irish inde- 
pendence, did not wish to commit itself to any 
step which would make it more difficult than it 
need be to win the cooperation of the Unionist 
workingmen of Belfast and the North. Curi- 
ously enough, while Sinn Fein was calling upon 
Irish Labor to withdraw from membership of 
English Trades Unions, the Unionist leaders in 
Ulster were trying to induce Belfast Labor to do 

[307] 



the same thing: but while Sinn Fein objected to 
the English Labor Party because it was English, 
the Ulster politicians objected to it because it was 
in favor of Home Rule. Among the Sinn Fein 
papers, New Ireland, while faithful to the reso- 
lution of the Convention, saw most clearly the 
reasons which explained the Labor attitude and, 
while expressing the hope that a severance from 
the English Unions would eventually occur, 
pleaded for toleration and for, in the meantime, 
a free hand for Labor. 

But the Sinn Fein difficulty in regard to Labor 
lay deeper than any mere question of tactics. 
The leaders of Irish Labor might be Republicans, 
but they were also largely Socialists, and where 
Socialism is suspected the Church has to be reck- 
oned with. James Connolly, the revered leader 
of Irish Labor, had been (though he died a sin- 
cere Catholic) supposed to have come into con- 
flict with the Church for his opinions on social 
questions. His associate, James Larkin, had 
more than once furnished a text for some very 
plain speaking in pastorals and from the altar 
for the alleged subversive and immoral tendency 
of his teaching on Labor questions. During the 
General Election of 191 8 a sentence from James 
Connolly's writings, which had been quoted on a 
Sinn Fein election poster, was the subject of a 
bitter and prolonged controversy, during which 
[308] 



Sinn Fein was challenged by a militant Church- 
man either to repudiate Connolly's political 
philosophy or to declare itself opposed to the 
authoritative teaching of the Church. Sinn Fein, 
very wisely, did neither: but it was felt very gen- 
erally that while this might be wisdom for the 
moment, it was not wisdom for all time : and Sinn 
Fein has still to formulate its social philosophy. 

The conclusion of the war made no difference 
in the government or Ireland except that more 
troops might be expected to be available for the 
maintenance of law and order. Martial law was 
not relaxed or revoked: the Competent Military 
Authority retained unimpaired over large areas 
of Ireland the power to arrest and imprison 
(often for long periods) persons charged with 
every variety of offense which could be interpreted 
as dangerous to the prestige and efficiency of that 
form of government which is best administered 
under the sanction of a courtmartial. Men, 
women and children were arrested upon charges 
not specified and committed to prison for periods 
impossible to ascertain either from the authori- 
ties who sent them, or the authorities who kept 
them there. It was under such circumstances 
that Ireland was asked to take part in the Victory 
Election of 191 8. The electors of Great Bri- 
tain were asked to give a " mandate " to the 
British representatives at the Peace Conference, 
[309] 



and " to strengthen their hands " in exacting 
from the Central Empires and their Allies the 
full measure of punishment. Ireland decided to 
give a " mandate " which was neither asked for 
nor desired and to *' strengthen the hands " of 
the Peace Plenipotentiaries in demanding that for 
which the war had ostensibly been fought — the 
freedom of small nations. It was known that 
the Parliamentary Party would retain only a frac- 
tion of the seats it once held and that Sinn Fein 
would be in a majority. For a time it seemed 
as if the verdict of the majority might be weak- 
ened by the intrusion of Labor candidates who, 
though most of them were Sinn Feiners in point 
of fact and all of them were bound by the Labor 
Party not to attend Parliament except when or- 
dered by the Labor Congress, would give no 
pledge of absolute and rigid abstention from the 
EngHsh Parliament and were Labor candidates 
first and Sinn Feiners afterwards. At one time 
it seemed as if an acute conflict between Sinn 
Fein and Labor might occur. But the Labor 
Party, recognizing the extreme importance of Ire- 
land having an opportunity of delivering an un- 
equivocal verdict in the most important election 
that had been held for a generation, finally agreed 
to withdraw its candidates and to allow the elec- 
torate to decide on the political question only. 
The decision was conclusive on the question. Out 

[310] 



of 1 06 members returned for Irish constituencies, 
73 were Sinn Fein candidates, pledged to absten- 
tion from the English Parliament and to the claim 
of Irish independence. 



[311] 



CONCLUSION 

The months before the European War broke 
out saw Nationalist Ireland practically unanimous 
in its support of the Home Rule legislation of 
the Liberal Government, ready to be reckoned 
as a part of the British Empire, prepared to 
acknowledge the supremacy of the Imperial Par- 
liament, content with an Irish Parliament charged 
only with the control of a number of matters of 
domestic concern. Though the policy of the 
Home Rule Act had been definitely and deliber- 
ately adopted by the English electorate, it was de- 
feated by threats of armed resistance on the part 
of a minority of Irishmen, backed by promises 
of support from a minority of Englishmen, and 
by the refusal of the Liberal Government either 
to vindicate its own constitutional authority or 
to appeal to the country to do so for it. The 
Government put itself in the position of seem- 
ing to prefer in England the conciliation of its 
enemies to the satisfaction of its friends, and in 
Ireland to acknowledge the claim of a minority 
to veto the legitimate expectations of the ma- 
jority. Occupying this position at home, it 
[312] 



plunged into a war in Europe to vindicate " in- 
ternational morality " and " the rights of small 
nations," as a protest against the doctrine that 
the force of arms is superior to the force of jus- 
tice and law. The month after the war ended 
saw Nationalist Ireland still claiming and still 
denied (in obedience to the same obstructing 
forces) the right of self-determination: but the 
self-determination sought was no longer that in 
which before the war it had been content to 
acquiesce. It held that the war, which it had 
done something to win, had secured to the weaker 
nationalities (if the public and reiterated pro- 
fessions of the victors were not meant deliberately 
to deceive the world as to their intentions) the 
right to their own national existence, independent 
of the claims and the interests of the stronger 
nations by whom they had been subjugated. It 
held that during the war the rights, the interests, 
the feelings and the liberty of Ireland had been 
treated by the English Government with so much 
indifference and disdain as to malce the future 
subordination of Ireland to English domination a 
prospect distasteful to Irishmen and a position 
injurious to Irish interests. It revived the claim 
of Ireland to independence, declaring that it was 
justified alike by history and by the common con- 
sent of Europe and America, and as a first step in 
the assertion of that claim refused for the first 
[313] 



time since the Act of Union to send representa- 
tives to sit in the EngHsh Parliament. The 
forces which produced so serious an alteration in 
the attitude of Ireland have been described in the 
foregoing pages. 

At the end of the war the only part of Ireland 
whose political outlook remained unaltered was 
the Unionist North-east. Upon the indurated 
surface of its political conscience nothing that 
had happened either in Ireland or out of it had 
produced the least effect. Alone in Europe the 
Ulster Unionist seemed to regard the war as a 
detachable episode with (so far as he was con- 
cerned) no political implications. He adopted 
the same standpoint, used the same language and 
expected it to meet with the same approving re- 
sponse from the same people. The changed atti- 
tude of other people was attributed by him to 
treachery, to disloyalty, to lack of fixed principle. 
By an adroit use of his opportunities during the 
war he managed to secure his position : he could 
point to the loyalty alike of those of his political 
faith who had enlisted and of those who had not 
enlisted: the former had done their duty to the 
Empire — the latter had performed their duty 
to the Government by providing it with a per- 
petual incentive to the conscription of Ireland. 
He had collected " pledges " from all who cared 
to give them that his position would be respected. 

[314] 



To reply upon the " pledge " of a politician as 
a bulwark against the advance of political ideas 
may seem a somewhat imbecile proceeding: but 
it was not in his case so imbecile as it looked. 
He was shrewd enough to see that what Euro- 
pean statesmen were doing was not by any means 
in accordance with what they were saying, and 
he decided (distrusting " ideas " of all kinds) to 
stake his future upon the relative permanence of 
things as they were rather than upon the doubt- 
ful advent of things as they ought to be. 

Sinn Fein was the opposite of all this. It ap- 
pealed alike from force and from fact to an ideal 
justice. Unable to win independence from a 
power both strong enough to coerce it and inter- 
ested for economic and military reasons in retain- 
ing its hold upon Ireland, it refused to ask for 
" pledges " which it felt sure would be broken, 
even if given, it refused to plead its case before 
a court whose interests were engaged against it 
in advance. It preferred to appeal to its rights, 
though there was no tribunal before which its 
plea could come. It hoped that at the Peace 
Conference the principle of self-determination 
could not be insisted upon as against Germany, 
without Germany claiming that it should be 
acknowledged in the case of Ireland. To its dis- 
may and (it would seem) to its surprise Germany 
was not represented at the discussions: the Peace 

[315] 



was dictated by a body in which none but the 
victors were represented and of which the object 
was not so much to establish a principle as to 
enforce a settlement, even at the risk of estab- 
lishing a precedent. The claim of Sinn Fein that 
Ireland should be represented at the Conference 
as an interested party was brushed aside, con- 
temptuously by the representatives of England 
and France, shamefacedly by the representative 
of America. The League of Nations which the 
Peace Conference set up was expressly constructed 
to prevent interference with the sovereign rights 
of its chief members as they existed at the time 
it was constructed : the right of England to retain 
whatever dominion it pleases over Ireland is 
guaranteed by the League of Nations in advance. 
Disappointed of the hopes placed in the Peace 
Conference and the League of Nations, Sinn Fein 
has to rely either on the interference in its favor 
of some Power whose friendship England can- 
not disregard (an interference rendered less easy 
than it was by the very League of Nations which 
was expected to make it easier) or on the grad- 
ual and silent force of European opinion, or on 
the result of some future war. 

Sinn Fein takes its stand upon the proposition 
that Ireland is a nation and upon the assertion 
that all nations have a just claim to independ- 
ence. The proposition cannot be controverted 
[316] 



except by arguments which go to prove that no 
such thing as a nation exists, and the assertion 
that all nations have a just claim to independence 
is like the assertion that all men have a right to 
be free : each is admitted in principle, but the 
principle is subject in practice to so many modi- 
fications that to say that a nation is free is to say 
what may mean as many different things as there 
are nations called free. A nation may be po- 
litically free and economically dependent, or vice 
versa : each of these conditions may be of various 
degrees on each side: and each of these again 
may be combined with varying degrees of moral, 
social and intellectual dependence. 

Sinn Fein aims at the complete political, the 
complete economical and the complete moral and 
intellectual independence of Ireland. It has first 
to secure independence of England, and, having 
secured that, to avoid falling into dependence on 
any other Power. Its immediate problem Is the 
means of securing independence of England. To 
induce England to acknowledge the independence 
of Ireland (to force her being out of the question, 
unless allies are to appear in the future) is no 
solution, as is abundantly proved by the history of 
their relations: the independence acknowledged 
in 1783 was recalled in 1800 and has been denied 
ever since. To induce the League of Nations, as 
at present constituted, to acknowledge the inde- 
[317] 



pendence of Ireland is out of the question : if it 
were reconstituted so as to make it possible for 
it to do so, mere recognition of independence 
would 'be useless, unless the League were in a 
position to guarantee that it would continue to 
be recognized. 

The means at the disposal of Sinn Fein at pres- 
ent hardly seem adequate to accomplish its object. 
It may bring about the moral and intellectual 
independence of Ireland: it may secure a certain 
measure of economic independence: but to secure 
political independence, in face of the forces ranged 
against it, seems impossible. But what it cannot 
do for itself may in the future be done for it by 
the moral forces of which it is a manifestation. 
It may in the future be recognized by the con- 
science of mankind that no nation ought to exer- 
cise political domination over another nation. 
But that future may still be as remote as it seemed 
in the days of the Roman Empire. 



[3>8] 

a 635 



